


Translation and Rotation in the Euclidean Plane

by sweetcupncakes



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, ACD Canon Divergence, Comfort/Angst, Coming of Age, Depression, Drug Abuse, Eventual Johnlock, Healing, Indian Character, Kissing, M/M, Psychology, Self-Destructive Tendencies, Sexual Content, Sexual Identity, Sherlock's Self-Loathing, Sherlock-centric, Victor Trevor is Wonderful, astrophysicist!victor, but Victor is so important, took liberties with canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-14 11:04:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2189295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetcupncakes/pseuds/sweetcupncakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock’s first kiss is with Lydia Mottershead on Pentecost Sunday.  The event is largely unremarkable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nothingislittle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingislittle/gifts).
  * Translation into Polski available: [Przesunięcie i obrót na płaszczyźnie euklidesowej](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6396634) by [tehanu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehanu/pseuds/tehanu)



> aka as five times kissing another person, and one time being kissed instead.
> 
> Trigger warnings for minor insight into psychology, including Cluster B traits, etc. Being sad and being unable to point out exactly _why_. Drug abuse, overdose incident, but not graphic. An instance of overly-aggressive kiss, and bullying, again not graphic. Some homophobic language. Discovering and accepting oneself's sexuality.
> 
>  
> 
> Victor is a wonderful guy, and deserves your love. Everyone needs hugs. And although there is john/sherlock to be had, Victor's role is the inciting impact event and will be seen in both chapters. 
> 
>  
> 
> I've had this hanging around on my google docs for awhile. The second chapter is mostly written, just needs a little fleshing and will be posting in another week or so. Once again, I've written something to basically help myself because I'm pretty selfish that way. Gifting to nothingislittle (too lazy to html because I'd have to google how to link) because I'm pretty sure there was a tumblr discussion some weeks ago about boys kissing boys and our mutual love of emotional angst. And because I wanted to use the "gift this work" box.

\---

Sherlock’s first kiss is with Lydia Mottershead on Pentecost Sunday. The event is largely unremarkable. He’s seven, and Mother and Mrs. Mottershead are still dressed in their Sunday hats, taking tea in the garden. Mother doesn’t believe in the Holy Spirit, or God, or The Son, but she likes the routine of the church services. Tells Sherlock that important lessons can be learned through religious meditation.

Sherlock can’t sit still long enough to be bothered by fictitious spirits bent on his eternal salvation.

Somehow Lydia decides that Sherlock should kiss her. She says her sister has a boyfriend in university, and they’re always kissing, and doesn’t Sherlock want to kiss her?

He doesn’t, not really, he doesn’t even think Lydia is pretty, but he says, “Fine,” and Lydia puckers her lips. He grimaces at her closed eyes, her full cheeks, her upturned nose, and quickly presses their lips together.

Sherlock wipes off his mouth, Lydia’s strawberry chapstick comes off on the top of his hand. Terrible. He says as much to her.

Lydia shrugs, smacks her lips a couple times, and says in agreement, “I can’t see what the fuss is about.”

\---

 

Sherlock is ten when he catches Mycroft kissing Anna, the butcher’s daughter.

Sometimes Sherlock has dreams that shake him awake, leave him with a sense of terror so visceral that it seems the shadows cast on the walls are alive and watching him. It isn’t real, none of it is, but Sherlock is young and illogical and he can’t help the bright panic that propels him out of the bed to seek out safety elsewhere.

Mycroft complains when Sherlock slips cold toes under the blankets and lies alongside him. He tells Sherlock that he’s too old now to be afraid of the dark, and why doesn’t Sherlock just cuddle up with Mummy if he insists on acting like such an infant. Why must Sherlock steal all the sheets? Why does he squirm so much? It’s annoying. 

Eventually he shuts up and lets Sherlock have his way. Mycroft always lets Sherlock has his way.

He knows where to step so that the floorboards don’t creak, and nears Mycroft’s door. It’s barely cracked, muted yellow light spilling out across Sherlock’s feet. He hears a soft hum, a quiet laugh that isn’t Mycroft’s own because it isn’t nasally or pretentious. Sherlock stands just so, peeks through the tiny sliver where the door is ajar. 

“I’ve got to get back,” Anna murmurs, one hand gripping the lip of the open window, all of her other fingers are clutching the front of Mycroft’s night shirt. Sherlock always thought her a unique sight among the other girls in town. Brown hair cropped short like a boy’s, above her ears, she dresses in slacks and men’s shirts, and curses Sherlock in Polish under her breath when he asks for the animal odds and ends to use in experiments. 

“I’m not keeping you,” Mycroft’s tilts his head, then he presses their mouths together.

Sherlock has never seen this before. Sure, little love pecks between Mummy and Father, the dramatic kisses between lovers on television shows. But not this, and frankly, Sherlock finds it a bit appalling. The fact that anyone would voluntarily exchange saliva with Mycroft is disturbing in itself.

Mycroft’s tawny hair is mussed in the back, and obviously the two have been mauling each other because Sherlock can see a purple bruise high on Mycroft’s throat. Their mouths make wet, smearing sounds as they touch. Mycroft runs his hands all the way down Anna’s ribs and Sherlock thinks he might vomit.

Finally they pop apart, apparently someone having decided that time for sucking each other’s lips is over. Who determines the pace in these exchanges? How does one simply decide “enough now,” and expect the other to know this? How is this even remotely enjoyable for either party when there are all these _variables_ to consider?

Anna smiles, says goodbye, and makes her way out of the window and down the trellis, no doubt crushing Mummy’s Wisteria in the process. Mycroft watches her, watches and watches, and surely the girl must be out of sight by now. Eventually he comes away, touching his lips and flopping backward onto the bed.

The panic from earlier is gone now, thoroughly obliterated by Sherlock’s dismay at the image presented to him now; his sixteen year old brother utterly stricken, sprawled out to swoon.

He goes back to his bed. Sherlock will take his chances with the nightmares.

\---

Sherlock hordes the knowledge of the fault in Mycroft precise self-composition, keeps it to himself to be used at the appropriate time. Information is power, it’s something his brother taught him.

The time comes two weeks later when Sherlock accidentally lights their father’s set of golfing clubs on fire. He’d only wanted the one club, only wanted to see if the steel would heat enough to be beaten flat like a steel smith might do. It went wrong. He underestimated the importance of a kiln. Now the clubs are intact, but scorched black, and the leather handles are melted. 

Mycroft looks at the wrecked experiment, hands shoved in his pockets, and announces dutifully, “Mummy bought him that set for Christmas. Whatever will she say to this mess? Tsk. Tsk.”

Sherlock smirks, his moment finally come. “I don’t know. What do you think she’d say if I told her you’ve been sneaking Anna Malinowski through your bedroom window at night?”

Mycroft face blanches, and just as quickly his cheeks are flooded with red embarrassment. He shifts on his feet, eyes narrowing. “That’s none of your business.”

“Trust me, I wish I could erase the image from my head as well. Now, are you going to help me hide this, or do we go have a talk with Mummy?”

Mycroft’s lips thin, he says, “Damn,” and kneels beside Sherlock. “We’ll have to throw them into the pond.”

\---

The stand at the muddy edge of the duck pond. They’re both sweating, fingers black from having hauled the scorched clubs a kilometre through the woods to get to the water. One by one, Mycroft flings the things away, they sink heavily into the water, down to the mucky bottom.

“Why do you do it?” Sherlock asks as Mycroft attempts to throw a putter like a javelin. 

“Be specific.” The putter soars magnificently, before diving under.

“Kissing, obviously. It looks wretched.” And wet, unsanitary. Sherlock doesn’t even like it when Grandmere visits and places adoring pecks on both of his cheeks before pulling him into a tight hug. _Ah, mon petit canard!_ she exclaims while Sherlock rubs her peachy lip rouge from his face.

Mycroft only sighs, the accompanying eyeroll telegraphed through the sound. “It’s nothing more than relieving a physical urge. Nothing to be alarmed over. When you’re older you’ll understand and be embarrassed that we had this conversation at all.”

Sherlock snorts, “You’re mental.”

Sherlock doesn’t see how fitting mouths together and licking against another person’s tongue could be any relief at all. Mycroft is so infrequently wrong about anything, but Sherlock certainly has his doubts this time. 

“Father is going to be terribly confused when he goes to pack for his golfing trip to York.” Mycroft dips his hands in the water and washes the black from his fingers. “Ah, well.”

\---

Sherlock is fourteen and he knows he’s different. It’s not just his mind, it’s not that it’s constantly spinning on it’s axis, it isn’t the fact his memory is eidetic and sometimes it’s physically painful _knowing_ and knowing. 

It’s the part where Sherlock looks at other boys and wants to be closer to them. To touch them. He sees two men kissing behind Downey Pub when Sherlock sneaks out one night. 

It looks right. He isn’t the only one. It’s like someone opened a window in a stifling room, and he feels relieved.

One of Father’s old friends from University is visiting for the weekend, they’re off on a deer stalking excursion. It leaves Sherlock alone with the man’s son, Michael, he’s one year older than Sherlock. At Mummy’s pleading, Sherlock is trying to be charming enough not to send the boy out screaming onto the moors. Sherlock’s room has been turned into a guest room for the time being, Mummy has set up two cots in the sitting room for both Sherlock and Michael.

Mummy goes to bed and they’re left to watch telly. It’s a ridiculous film, a horror about birds attacking a local bay population with no inciting event whatsoever. Illogical.

A woman’s beak-mangled body is left on a stoop, and Michael’s fingers twitch in shock, his palm lands on the top of Sherlock’s hand.

Sherlock tries very hard to be still, to keep looking forward, but his mouth falls open on a tiny surprised gasp for air when Michael doesn’t immediately remove his hand. 

His palm is warm, sticky, where it touches. Then it’s gone and Sherlock can still feel the weight. Michael shoves away and furrows his brow at the the birds.

When they go to bed, Michael drags his cot to the other side of the room, as far away from Sherlock as possible. Michael lies down and turns to face the wall and Sherlock has no idea what he did wrong.

\---

 

Mycroft was right, God, he was right, and Sherlock wasn’t prepared for this at all.

He’s fifteen and skinny, too skinny, and everyone says he’s a sullen brat, but Sherlock doesn’t care. Everyone is wrong, and stupid, and Sherlock isn’t. Really, he’s brilliant, but he can’t stop staring at the way Tommy Finnegan’s fingers move as he’s forced to help Sherlock assemble the football net for the sports field. Sherlock got in trouble for refusing to change into the athletics uniform, argued with the teacher, told him he, “--has no more brains than that of a game turkey.” Tommy laughed out loud, and they were both sent off to manual labour. 

“This is bollocks,” Tommy complains, voice lilting with his northern accent, a screw dropping from between his fingers and falling into the blades of grass. He squints and and ducks to retrieve it. Sherlock watches the boyish coil of his trapezius muscles shift underneath the navy tee, and gulps as his heart threatens to pick up its pace. Tommy looks up, catches Sherlock’s eyes. “Hey, whatsit?” 

“Nothing,” Sherlock murmurs, distracting himself with untangling the net from around a pole, and definitely does not admire the way the sun threads itself into Tommy’s ginger hair and makes it light up like a torch. 

 

“Don’t look like nothing,” Tommy smiles, then gives Sherlock a once-over. “Hand me that crossbar, would you?”

The boy isn’t intelligent, nor is he particularly extraordinary at anything aside from rugby, and Sherlock isn’t interested in rugby in the least. Somehow Sherlock continues to find himself captivated into watching him from around corners, across lecture rooms, and he likes the way Tommy’s voice sounds. He likes it when he smiles, and shows prominent front teeth, he likes it when Tommy makes a joke and laughs at himself. There’s really no reason for any of it, but still Sherlock looks at Tommy’s hands and imagines touching them. 

Which would be very bad.

He’s seen the things that happens to boys that touch other boys in this school, and Sherlock has quite enough enemies at present, thank you very much. 

He searches for the crossbar, not really sure if it’s this one long pole, or the other really long pole. He picks one, and passes it over toward Tommy. 

Instead of taking the thing itself, Tommy’s fingers curl around the column of Sherlock’s wrist, he tugs him closer. 

“Thanks, Holmes. But that’s the wrong one,” he whispers in Sherlock’s ear.

“I _djska--_ ” Sherlock stammers, knows he’s being teased, and doesn’t understand. “I.”

Tommy smiles wide, and turns back around.

\---

They meet below the grandstand after a game. The field is empty, and the rest of the team has gone off to the showers, then to their dormitories. Sherlock drew him there, stood from a distance and watched the senseless dance of sport, nodded nervously when Tommy saw him.

“It’ll be lights out, soon enough,” Tommy says quietly, stepping closer. “My mates will come looking for me.”

“I know,” Sherlock admits, swallows nervously and is thankful that his voice doesn’t betray the shake he feels going off inside of him. 

“So, you wanted something, then?” He looks around innocently, grabs a bar and lets his weight swing into Sherlock’s space.

It’s an experiment, Sherlock thinks, he’ll try it just this once to make sure it’s as unpleasant as it looked that night at Mycroft’s window. As boring as it was when he kissed Lydia Mottershead on Whitsunday. He says this to himself, even as his heart races. Even as he looks up into Tommy’s green eyes, and he pulls at the soiled rugby shirt until Sherlock is kissing him.

It’s not unpleasant, it’s not anything really. Their lips touch and it’s soft, chaste. It is, for a moment, at least. Then Tommy is on him, grabbing him around the waist and he sucks at Sherlock’s bottom lip, bites down.

“Come on, open your mouth,” Tommy pants at him, “Haven’t you ever done this before?”

“Actually--” but Sherlock’s words are muffled when Tommy takes advantage of the opportunity, pins Sherlock against the aluminum railing, and then there’s another person’s tongue in his mouth.

It’s too much at once, it’s overwhelming. Sherlock tries to kiss back, tries to gain control over the pace that has been set, and suddenly he feels smothered. He pushes at Tommy’s shoulders, they separate with a popping of lips.

“What? I thought you liked me.” Tommy pulls back, exasperated. “You’ve been watching me for weeks, are we going to get off or not?”

Sherlock had only wanted a kiss. 

Suddenly he feels ashamed over his own inexperience, as though it could have been helped. He’d instigated, after all, had been the one reach up to press their lips together and cross that line. He licks his lips, they feel bruised.

“You know what,” Tommy says, “Nevermind. You’d be a right mess to contend with anyways.” 

Sherlock takes a step back, burned. “I can try again,” and he hates himself for how meek it sounds. Tommy just laughs, incredulous, then turns around and jogs back toward the dormitories, leaving Sherlock alone. 

He touches his fingertips to his mouth, smears the last traces of Tommy Finnegan’s saliva against his skin.

\---

They corner Sherlock outside of chapel the next afternoon, four boys and Tommy standing off to the side, looking half guilty.

Sherlock drops his books to the ground, looks directly at Tommy and says, “I see.” He begins undoing his cuffs, rolling up his sleeves in preparation. He makes sure his violin’s case is hidden underneath the school blazer, lest it be seen and destroyed because Sherlock has made the mistake of loving it.

“Tommy here said you tried to make a pass at him last night,” the largest boy comments, fingers flexing then balling up. “Always took you for a dandy.”

“Very eloquent,” Sherlock says, bored to death by the anticipation. He continues to look at Tommy, still lovely, but now Sherlock can see the rejection complex carved open like a mouth at the center of the boy, and _it ,_ is very ugly indeed. Sherlock really ought to have known better, his judgement clouded with infatuation the way it was. “Could we get on with it, then? We have classes starting in a half hour.”

\---

 

Sherlock comes away from the fight with a myriad of injury. Black eye. Cut lip. Abraded knuckles. But it’s the cracked rib and broken fingers that gets Sherlock sent home. Or, more accurately, his mother is informed of the incident and she arrives in livid fashion eight hours later to pull Sherlock from this, _“Savage establishment, and you will be hearing from our attorney!”_

Sherlock clutches his violin case to his chest in the backseat of the car. His right hand is a mess of bandages, he won’t be able to play for weeks. He presses his head against the window, it’s cool against the bruise mottling his cheek. Curls crush themselves against the glass with soft scraping noises with every hitch in the road.

“Darling, what _happened_ ,” Mummy pleads for the eleventh time as Sherlock maintains his reticence. 

He thinks of Tommy standing back when Sherlock finally went down, his grimace when a boot caught Sherlock in the ribs and Sherlock could feel the crack. Cried out, involuntarily. Tommy who had just had just plastered his lips across Sherlock’s, stood there and watched, lied, and offered no defense. 

The leader of the group ended the fight by spitting on Sherlock. _“Queer,”_ he said, like a curse. They all walked away.

“Just a fight,” Sherlock says. “That’s all.”

\---

 

He’s eighteen, and Victor Trevor is the loveliest thing Sherlock has ever seen. They play next to each other in Symphonic band. Sherlock on the violin, Victor is the first chair flautist. University requires the completion of art electives, and Sherlock can’t imagine taking pottery, or Art Theory, and although he resents being forced into playing pieces he wouldn’t choose for himself, orchestra seems the most sensible option.

Victor Trevor, used to be Vijay Kasid. His family was forced to move from the state of Jammu and Kashmir when he was nine. The separatists in the region began taking over. He tells Sherlock about the murder squads, friends gone missing in the night that he never saw again. When the family fled, they left everything behind, even their name. They started anew in Cardiff.. Victor was young enough to assimilate, but the last vestiges of a Kashmiri accent clings to his vowels.

 

“Stop following me, don’t you have anything better to do?” Sherlock says, not meaning it at all. He opens the single window, stationed behind the brass instrument section, and lights a cigarette.

“You’ll have to do a lot better than a rude mouth if you don’t want company,” Victor grabs the cigarette, stamps it out on the windowsill and tosses the butt away. “Haven’t you heard of respiratory disease? I thought you were supposed to be smart.”

They’re always the last ones to leave the orchestra room. Sherlock likes the way his voice sounds when it echoes from the acoustic ceiling panels. Victor stays to clean his flute, to laugh at Sherlock’s unpredictable rants, occasionally practice an assignment. He’s quiet in a way that Sherlock likes, only speaks if it’s poignant or purposeful. He’s not much at all like Sherlock.  
Victor studies astrophysics, is constantly waxing poetic about electromagnetic spectrums, polytropes. Somehow every conversation includes the mention of Isaac Newton.

“Why waste my time on something I’ll never be able to fully understand. It’s a waste of space, of time,” Sherlock told Victor this.

“Einstein would disagree,” Victor replied loftily, not frustrated at all by Sherlock’s deliberate ignorance.

 

Sherlock never cared for astronomy. The universe and its sheer magnitude, it’s ever expanding endlessness, always leaves him with a profound sense of insignificance. 

Their commonality lies in their aloneness. People stay away from Sherlock because Sherlock is completely unsociable, rude, and cruel when provoked. They hate him because he’s always right.

No one likes Victor because of the colour of his skin, and somehow this means he’s so unforgivably different. Because Victor’s accent isn’t like every else’s. Because Victor was caught holding hands under the table with another boy in the canteen, because people are idiots and everyone thinks you can contract the HIV virus by breathing the same air of a perfectly healthy homosexual male.

Because Victor is genuinely good. A far cry from the rotten thing that took up its place at the core of Sherlock years ago, and never explained itself.

\----

Sherlock isn’t sure how they got here, how Victor goes from sitting in the uncomfortable aluminium folding chair Sherlock has positioned at his desk, to underneath Sherlock, arching and cupping his fingers over Sherlock’s ears to draw him closer.

This isn’t at all like kissing Tommy Finnegan beneath the grandstand. Hard, and intrusive, and moderately threatening. 

The lamplight had put Victor’s face in shadow as he sat composing an essay for some creative composition class. The way the darkness clung possessively to Victor’s nape, obscuring curls darker than Sherlock’s own, it caused something to contract in Sherlock’s chest to see it. He drew out the chair.

“Oi, not all of us have a photographic memory. I’m trying to study, William,” Victor said, wielding the knowledge of Sherlock’s first name like a weapon. It was meant to sound serious, but it only made Sherlock grip hard at the top of Victor’s thighs to hear his christian name.

Victor looked down at Sherlock’s hands and went silent, eyes dark and open. He absently uses a thumb to push his spectacles back to rest at the bridge of his nose.

“Can I try something?” Sherlock breathed, “You can say no.”

Victor only licked his bottom lip, “Please.” Sherlock straightened his spine, inhaled deeply, and touches his lips to Victor’s. 

Sherlock electrocuted himself once, stuck a bit of metal into a power outlet and let the charge knock into his skin. He’d wanted to see what it felt like. He nearly pissed himself, and decided not to try that again. Later though, he could still feel the charge inside of his body, a humming tremor.

Kissing Victor, the unsure first brush of their tongues, it jolts just like that, and Sherlock can’t help the noise that works its way up his throat. Victor makes such a sound, desperate, like one kiss has knocked him off some unforeseen ledge and put him in freefall. Victor drags Sherlock up from the floor, winds his hands up behind Sherlock’s back and clumsily walks them backward to the bed. Victor’s trainers step on Sherlock’s socked toes, but it doesn’t hurt. Sherlock lands on top of him, fingers frantically tracing along Victor’s jaw, his throat, the prominent hollow of his jugular notch. He can feel the muscles there clenching and releasing as they rub their mouths together.

It’s messy, neither of them are quite accustomed to being kissed, they both know it, and just don’t care. It’s not perfectly coordinated, but at the same time it’s the singular most wonderful thing that’s happened to Sherlock. Second only, perhaps, to his first high on cocaine. But he steadfastly keeps that part of his life to himself.

“I haven’t done this before,” Sherlock manages, wanting to excuse the inexpert clashing of teeth. “Sorry if I’m--” Victor pulls away to nose at Sherlock’s throat. He breathes warm air under Sherlock’s jaw. Victor’s fingertips smooth down the rut of Sherlock’s spine. His hands are shaking, and Sherlock is arching catlike.

“No, no no no,” Victor laughs nervously, “It’s good, don’t stop.”

“What do we do? What should I--” Sherlock says quickly, needing more information, wanting to be good. Wanting it to be good for Victor.

“Kiss me,” Victor pants. “I don’t know, keep doing, _ah,_ stuff.” 

“Yeah, okay,” Sherlock feels delirious, keeps kissing Victor’s mouth because that’s wonderful, and Victor told him so. He grabs hard onto Sherlock’s hips, pushes down, pulls Sherlock up, pushes down, up. They’re both hard, the realisation is thrilling, if not slightly mortifying because Sherlock can feel the widening damp spot in his pants where he is entirely too eager. Victor moans quietly at the friction, wriggles his hand down between them and palms Sherlock through the front of his trousers.

“Let’s uh, Let’s--” Victor stammers, and Sherlock experimentally sucks the cold lobe of Victor’s left ear between his teeth and scrapes his teeth along the fine hairs there. Victor stiffens, thrusts up against Sherlock and curses in a way he rarely does, comes in his pants. “Oh. That’s.” Says Victor, amazed like Sherlock has done something utterly incredible and rendered him incapable of complete sentences.

Sherlock has never witnessed another person’s orgasm before and perhaps it should feel awkward to have another man’s semen soaking into the front of his pyjama bottoms.

It only feels interesting, exciting, and Sherlock wants to watch Victor come again and again, wants to be the cause of it. Victor’s eyes are pinched closed, he’s breathing through his mouth, black hair a humid wreck against the duvet. Sherlock looks down at him, wide-eyed, straddles his hips and lets his hands push up Victor’s tee. He spreads his fingers when they come to rest on the bareness of Victor’s belly, Sherlock’s skin is milk white against the deep copper of Victor. The contrast makes Sherlock ache to see what it would look like to peel off their clothes and lie next to each other.

Victor catches his wrist, pulls it up to his mouth and kisses over his pulse, says urgently, “How do I make you come,” and doesn’t wait for Sherlock to answer. He struggles with the tie of Sherlock’s bottoms. The dark-rimmed spectacles that Victor always must wear are knocked completely lopsided from Sherlock’s clumsy fumblings, clouded from the oils rubbed off Sherlock’s skin.

“Yes, yes,” Sherlock nods, his lips against Victor’s as their fingers tangle, both sets trying to find purchase on the other's skin. Victor’s hand works its way under Sherlock’s pants, the first touch of his fingertips circling then curling around Sherlock’s penis is incredible. Shouldn’t be, but it is. Sherlock’s makes a noise that sounds too stupefied and childish to have been issued from him.

Victor only says, _“Oh,”_ and begins moving his wrist.

It’s more gentle than what Sherlock usually does to himself, the rare occasions where he’s forced to give in to biology, slower, but Sherlock is so wound up that it doesn’t matter. It takes all of seven strokes and ten seconds for Sherlock to come slick and whimpering over Victor’s knuckles.

Afterward, they don’t speak for several minutes. Victor looks on the other side of Sherlock’s bed for an old flannel and hands it over for Sherlock to clean himself up.

Finally Victor breaks the uncertain tension, announces, “Cup of tea, Noodles.”

“What?” Sherlock raises his brow at the ceiling, having no idea if this is a part of some post-copulation ritual and doesn’t want to appear _completely_ ignorant.

“I’m starved, let’s go to The Orchid.”

“What about your assignment?” Sherlock glances in the direction of scattered, disordered, papers covered with Victor’s tidy penmanship. Apparently they’d tipped the desk in their keenness. The still-fresh memory of it causes a sharp pang of longing to sizzle low in Sherlock’s belly.

Victor turns, smiles. His lips still a tender red hue, swollen from being kissed. 

\---

It happens again two days later.

Neither of them have any idea what they’re doing, their fumbling forged out of instinct and eagerness. 

It’s Victor pushing Sherlock into the orchestra’s supply cupboard after Professor Fattore asks for extra music stands. They keep their mouths pressed together, panting at one another, their hands tug at trousers and pants. Sherlock can’t seem to shut up, keeps repeating God’s name. He knocks over a pile of loose Ravel’s _Bolero_ from the supply case. Victor laughs breathlessly, says, “Watch it, God, Sherlock, _sh,”_ and rests his index finger against Sherlock’s lips.

Some purely basic impulse makes Sherlock open his mouth, take the finger in, and now that it’s against his tongue he sucks at it. It keeps him quiet, even as he occasionally hums a moan.

Victor chokes, unconsciously pushes the finger in and out in tiny increments, mimics the rhythm of Sherlock’s uncreative strokes on Victor’s cock. Victor begins trembling, pushes closer to Sherlock’s body, their erections slide together. It’s hot, soft and hard at the same time, and how could this be wrong, Sherlock thinks. 

How could people think that?

“I’m about to--” Victor gasps, the hand he was using to pull at Sherlock’s cock, now grips his hip. He pushes that finger even farther into Sherlock’s mouth. It curls against the cup of Sherlock’s tongue as Victor muffles himself in the crook of Sherlock’s neck. He ejaculates, soaks the hem of the old jumper Sherlock had thrown on in a hurry that morning. 

Victor sighs, breath a humid thing against Sherlock’s throat. One hand drops from Sherlock’s hip, reaches behind and grabs idly at Sherlock’s bottom.

 _“Mmpf,”_ Sherlock grunts inelegantly, thrusts up against cotton shirts, the softening mound of Victor’s erection and bites down on the finger still fucking his mouth. After their aftershocks have been ridden out, he lets it slip wetly from between his lips.

“We’ve made a mess of each other, here,” Victor pulls off his striped cardigan, “Wear this.” 

Sherlock strips off his soiled jumper, slips the cardigan over his vest. Victor inspects himself, wipes a bit of semen off of his trousers with his scarf and giggles. Sherlock gathers the music stands, breath catching at the sight of Victor’s flush, evident even through the hue of his skin. It reminds him of raspberries and cinnamon.

“People are going to notice me wearing your clothes,” Sherlock realises. He’s constantly pointing these things out to the inhabitants of his dormitory, other men coming home with a bit of smudged lipstick against their collar. Perfume heavy on their coats. A complete change of wardrobe is even more obvious than all of that.

“Who cares,” Victor rolls his eyes, grabs the door handle, then turns back in alarm. “I mean, unless you don’t want.. I understand, trust me, I really do.”

Sherlock thinks about it for a moment, pushes next to Victor and opens the door.

\---

It’s good. Exciting and different, and it helps take up space in Sherlock’s mind. Sometimes Sherlock falls asleep on Victor’s bed. The other boys in his hall have taken up breaking into Sherlock’s room and hiding all of his books, his clothes, random things that are boring on their own, but it’s inconvenient to go to class in the middle of winter with no socks. He always finds his possessions, takes care to exact his revenge by leaving plates full of mold under their beds so that their rooms reek of it.

“You should be a detective,” Victor tells him one morning, watching Sherlock follow Warren Leedy’s muddy foot tracks through the gymnasium.

“Work my way up the ranks? Be a team player? Don’t think I’m exactly the psychological profile the Yard is looking to hire. Ha!” Sherlock pulls his Organic Chemistry text from under the pile of rugby gear. 

 

One morning he wakes up to the snap of a camera. The shutter and click of the lens drags him along the edge of wakefulness. He opens his eyes and Victor is watching him through the sight of a Contax. 

“What on earth are you doing?” Sherlock rubs sleep from his eyes. He’s shirtless, trousers loose on his hips because he never buttoned them back last night. Victor had pushed him flat on the bed, undid the fastenings, said _tell me if it’s bad,_ and took Sherlock’s cock into his mouth.

Yes, there was the occasional sharp edge of teeth, he accidentally choked Victor when his hips couldn’t help but push up into soft heat. It was still fantastic. Sherlock, not to be outdone in experimentation, returned the favour with enthusiasm. He found the tight grip of Victor’s fingers wound into his curls to be quite satisfactory, and urged him to pull harder. Victor wouldn’t because Victor is gentle and self-conscious that way, and while Victor might have been appalled when he came without warning down Sherlock’s throat, Sherlock was greedy to have it all.

 

Victor depresses the shutter release again. “I can keep you stilled this way. No running off.” Something sad crosses Victor’s eyes, before it’s hidden behind the viewfinder. Sherlock doesn’t understand it. Once mother told him that if it wasn’t for gravity, Sherlock would simply sail off the face of the earth. _Be calm, darling,_ she said, _there’s no hurry, life isn’t a race._ But there was always something taking Sherlock away.

“Where would I go? You’re here.” Sherlock tests the words with his mouth.

It’s good. They’ve known each other for a year, have been shagging each other for three months, and it’s good. 

Until it isn’t.

\---

 

Sherlock makes the mistake of seeing Victor when he’s in the middle of a glorious high. It’s not the first time he’s been with Victor under the effect, but he’s never been like _this._ It’s actually the most cocaine he’s ever taken, he’s been awake for nearly 98 hours. It was nothing more than a need to stay awake long enough to complete tedious assignments and see through the products of some of his own experiments. He began coming down, body weak and tremulous, and it was simply easier to take another bump. His mind could sort through problems faster, Sherlock didn’t feel the off-balancing need of hunger or fatigue.

Sherlock lets himself into Victor’s room, straddles him. Victor laughs against Sherlock’s lips, brushes his hands into Sherlock’s wild hair.

“Hello there,” Victor cheeks, “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow, but I’m certainly not com _plaining.”_ His voice hitches when Sherlock begins wrenching Victor’s shirt up, hooks his fingers and rakes them down Victor’s chest. He feels invincible, his skin buzzes and Sherlock rocks against Victor’s hold.

“I want you to fuck me,” Sherlock whispers, rolls his hips so that the bulges in their jeans rub together. “I’ve been reading about it, I want--”

Victor holds Sherlock by the shoulder and pushes him away, “Hold on.” Sherlock rolls his eyes, because they’ve had this argument before. While Victor is comfortable with his sexuality, he is less comfortable with discussing penetrative sex. He’s even less enthusiastic when Sherlock is asking to be the penetrated party. Victor says there’s no rush, that he doesn’t need to lay someone in order to have a “real” relationship, and most importantly he doesn’t want to hurt Sherlock. Neither of them have done _that_ before, and it’s a big step, Victor claims.

He gets angry and hurt when Sherlock insists that Victor has a subconscious shame of his homosexuality and the cultural taboos that surround anal sex. Victor walked away from Sherlock last time, saying _this isn’t one of your experiments, and we’ll do it when we’re_ both _ready._

Sherlock feels so alive right now, and wants badly to--

“Something is wrong with you, what’s wrong with you?” Victor peers closer at Sherlock’s eyes. 

“Nothing,” Sherlock tries to distract him by creeping down his body, he licks softly at a dusky nipple. Victor isn’t deterred, he’s the exact opposite, instead he’s grabbing Sherlock by the wrist and taking his pulse. He’s counting the beats, watching the clock on the wall even as Sherlock begins to struggle to pull away.

“You’re _high,”_ Victor says, incredulous.

“Everyone is,” Sherlock replies, suddenly defensive and volatile because it isn’t Victor’s business at all. Sherlock is an adult and capable of making his own choices, and Victor just doesn’t _understand_ what it’s like for Sherlock. He needs this. “Or perhaps you’d notice the vast majority of your hall with needles in their arms if you had half a mind.”

Victor rolls out from under Sherlock, sits with his back to him. “It doesn’t make it fine. Don’t you read the news? People are overdosing all the time. Sharing needles and--and--” Victor buries his face in his hands, rubs them frenetically up and down. His spectacles clatter unceremoniously to floor. “Why?”

“You’re angry,” worse than that, Sherlock can see the disappointment in the slope of Victor’s shoulders. 

“I’m concerned, I’m worried about you. I know you’ve been acting different lately, but I just thought--” Victor turns, cups his cheeks, rubs his thumbs over Sherlock’s cheekbones. “What do I do? To make you not need it? I’ll do it, okay? Anything.”

It hurts Sherlock, watching the desperation flicker bright and helpless in Victor’s eyes. He wants badly to make it go away, to make Victor stop staring at Sherlock like he’s some broken, _wrong_ , thing.

“I’ll stop, I’m sorry,” Sherlock promises, says it with such determination “I didn’t think it would worry you. I’ll stop,” and knows it for the lie that it is. Despite how wonderful Victor can be, his biggest fault lies in the fact that he’s gullible. He honestly believes Sherlock is worthy of his trust, and believes the things he says.

Victor kisses him deep, longing seeping into the crevasses of their mouths, until Victor pulls away. “I’ll make you something to eat. Stay here tonight.” 

\---

 

Sherlock sleeps for nearly two days straight. When he wakes up, Victor is in class. Sherlock eats a ham and cheese sandwich. He feels hollowed out, half-alive and wandering. 

Three hours later he’s shooting up, and he doesn’t feel guilty. Promises are broken all the time.

\---

“What do you want to be after we finish?” He means university, it’s something Victor constantly frets over. They’re lying next to each other in Victor’s bed. It’s the first time Sherlock has been in bed with him where they’re both clothed, and neither of them are instigating sex. Somehow he feels more laid bare than if he was naked, this way. This is intimacy, and it frightens Sherlock somehow, the simplicity of it.

Sherlock considers the question, and can’t find a good answer, re-directs. “What do _you_ want to be?”

Victor is quiet, slips his hand under Sherlock’s and turns his palm upward. His fingers slot through the soft gaps between Sherlock’s fingers. It’s an answer.

Because Sherlock, deep down, is a coward, he says nothing back.

\---

Victor lies on top of Sherlock, his body is damp. He’s a hot, stabilising weight. Sherlock feels pinned down, secured, wants to ask Victor to continue holding him place. To clamp his fingers around Sherlock’s forearms and push them hard against the bed so that he can feel it, so that it makes the constant train of thought go fuzzy. Sherlock says nothing of this, simply enjoys the way Victor eclipses his entire body. Sherlock naked and vulnerable, bellies both slick from their rutting. Victor pulled Sherlock’s hair, moaned against his lips, only rolling on top of him when Sherlock started trembling.

It makes him feel special. Significant even among the glowing spheres of gas elements that Victor cherishes so. Valued for something more than the fluidity of his intellect, to be wanted as a whole instead of just bits.

It’s terrifying.

\---

“What is this?” 

Sherlock opens the door to his room and Victor is sitting on the edge of the bed, a syringe and a small bag of powder clutched in his fingers. Sherlock closes the door and stares.

 _“What_ , Sherlock?” Victor’s voice is angry, hissing between his teeth. Sherlock has seen Victor frustrated, hurt, sad, has been the cause of it, but he’s never seen Victor lose his temper. Not once. Victor’s hands are shaking now.

“You know what it is,” Sherlock’s voice doesn’t betray the first burn of panic in his chest. He’s worked years so that his voice doesn’t give hint as to what he actually feels. It’s the best defense he has. 

“I do, but I want to hear you say it.” Victor’s eyes are hard, pleading even as he gazes directly into Sherlock’s line of sight. “You promised me. You _promised_ me.”

Sherlock did, has promised to stop using, and to date he has promised five times, yet Victor keeps coming back. The second time Victor wouldn’t have known if Sherlock’s dealer hadn’t made a point of poor innuendo for an exchange in the middle of the canteen on a Tuesday. The third time Mycroft called Victor and told him to fetch Sherlock from where he’d passed out behind the Sainsbury’s on St. Andrews. He’d forgotten to eat or drink anything for a few days, he was busy and a glass of water just hadn’t occurred to Sherlock. The fourth time Victor said he’d leave. Issued the ultimatum and told Sherlock to choose.

Sherlock’s most egregious error in judgement, is in thinking that Victor’s promises are just as empty as Sherlock’s own. Sherlock looks at Victor’s shaking fingers, and knows he’s lost him.

“You don’t understand” Sherlock begins to say, “You can’t possibly understand what it’s like inside of my head.”

“I can’t!” Victor shouts, uncaring of anyone inhabiting the rooms next to Sherlock’s, “I can’t understand, because you won’t _let_ me! Let me help, please let me, please Sherlock. I’m here, I’ve been here, and you--you’re--you don’t care at _all_ do you?” He looks at Sherlock, the question a sentence that might as well be written onto his face in plain, bold, letters. Sherlock doesn’t have an answer.

“If you’re going to leave, you might want to re-think the phrasing. One B dormitory over is hardly leaving.” He watches Victor’s face twist awfully. Sherlock looks away.

“Is this what you want, then?” Victor holds up the syringe, the packet, and throws it to the floor. Even with Victor’s voice going hoarse, growing thick and creaking, Sherlock fingers still only itch to pick up the drugs from off the floor. “You think you’re being clever, that taking this helps keep you together. But you’ve lost ten pounds in under two months. You forget to eat or drink, or go to class. You’re falling apart, Sherlock! I know what you do when you’re not beside me, I’m not completely stupid. You need _help.”_ Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“I won’t watch you do this to yourself.”

“Well, I’m certainly not forcing you to stay. I don’t recall locking the doors.”

“God, but you have!” Victor’s eyes begin to fill up, go glossy, and everything inside of Sherlock freezes over. Aside from one small, shattering bit, Sherlock pauses. “You’re always leaving. Always. Even when you’re next to me, you’re leaving.” He suddenly lurches forward, Sherlock has a brief second of panic when he thinks Victor means to strike him. Victor’s hands only rest hard against Sherlock’s cheeks, he kisses him fiercely and pulls away to mash their foreheads against one another. Victor buries his hands in Sherlock’s unwashed curls. He holds them tight together.

“You’re sad,” he says hoarsely, “Sherlock, why are you so sad?” He searches imploringly into Sherlock’s eyes.

He says nothing at first. He doesn’t know, so he denies. “Obviously you’re deflecting your issues onto me. I’m absolutely fine.” 

Victor exhales noisily, turns away while he wipes at his eyes.. “You hurt yourself, me, and I keep staying because I love you. I _love_ you. Do you understand that? Do you care at all?”

Sherlock’s eyes go wide and he stares at Victor.

“You can’t even say it back,” Victor’s voice recedes, small and helpless. “Can you not see how there is something very wrong about this? Am I not enough for you?” A tear escapes, then another. Victor’s eyes beg Sherlock to say _you are, you are enough._ “Am I?” 

“You’re finite,” Sherlock evades.

“Aren’t we all? That’s not what I asked.”

Sherlock says nothing, wishes in spite of himself that he was high, because then perhaps he could think. 

Victor barks some sort of a laugh to cover up a sob, face contorting when he looks up at the ceiling. “I think understand now.”

“You don’t.”

“I do.” The tears roll freely, Victor smiles sadly. He touches Sherlock’s ears with his palms, a caress so soft Sherlock hardly feels it before it’s gone. “You’d rather hate yourself,” he brings Sherlock’s balled fists up to his lips, kisses the knuckles, and pulls away, “Than love me.”

\---

 

It’s two weeks before Sherlock works up the nerve to face Victor again. Their last conversation left him empty, rattled, and there has to be some better way to do _this._ Whatever it is .

Victor’s dormitory room is empty. A few hangers dangle in the cupboard, all of his books are gone. Sherlock searches the cavity left behind in Victor’s absence, searches the drawers for evidence as to where he might have gone He finds the bin in the corner of the room, begins tossing the rubbish out of it. Four Crunchie bar wrappers, evidence of Victor’s sweet tooth, tissues, crumpled scraps of paper, and finally Sherlock finds it. 

It’s a photograph of Sherlock, asleep with his trousers half shoved down his hips. His mouth is open slightly, and his eyes are closed. He doesn’t recognise himself, this person’s body is more filled out, there aren’t purple rings under Sherlock’s eyes. The sun beams across the nape of Sherlock’s neck, the skin bright and healthy, the occasional freckle breaks up the plane of white.

 _I hope you find what you’re looking for._ Written on the back.

\---

“You do realise I’m very busy. I’m your brother, not a GPS.”

“You’re both, now tell me where he’s gone.” On the other end of the phone Mycroft dawdles, sighs. “You pay my professors to spy on me, but you can’t tell me this one simple thing?” He won’t say anymore, it’s embarrassing enough asking Mycroft in the first place. Just another example of how Sherlock manages to colossally fuck everything up. “Please,” Sherlock grits out.

“Victor Trevor, formerly Vijay Kasid, applied for an internship at The Lang in New York. Approximately six weeks ago. He was accepted soon, thereafter.” The time of his ultimatum to Sherlock. “He initially put a hold on the on the offer, but accepted two days before the position was rescinded. I wonder whatever changed his mind,” Mycroft adds wistfully.

Sherlock begins to reply, only realising then that his mouth is so full of nothing that it’s nauseating.

“This whim of yours is going to get you killed, or worse.” 

“I have it under control,” Sherlock bites out at his brother, he won’t be judged by Mycroft of all people. He’s been at it all his life, correcting Sherlock, being better than Sherlock at everything.

“I wasn’t just referring to the drugs,” and the pretentious edge has left Mycroft’s tongue, been replaced with the authoritative tone that Sherlock has known since they were boys and Mycroft had said _I’m going to teach you everything I know._ Then proceeded to do just that. 

“Don’t get emotional. Sentiment leaves too much room for error. Tread carefully, brother mine.”

\---

Sherlock finds the purple checkered sock that Victor left under his bed and dissolves it in acid.

Sherlock barely passes his graduate examination. He moves to London immediately thereafter. He doesn’t think about kissing anymore, he tries to delete what it felt like to have Victor’s leg slotted between Sherlock’s thighs while they slept. The image distorts, but holds, and Sherlock buries it under old memories of childhood.

Sherlock burns the first note Victor passed him in Orchestra. A banana wearing a hat, the _Hullo Sherlock!_ in a speech bubble above his head. It flakes into cinders. He crushes them between his fingers.

Sherlock gets high and breaks into a crime scene. Sherlock gets arrested, cuffed, a grey haired officer stuffs him into the back of the police car. 

“You ought be arresting the gardner, those aren’t just simple soil stains,” Sherlock announces cheerfully as the door shuts. He gets to see the man’s confused, _“What?”_ as the vehicle pulls away from the curb.

Later the detective removes him from the tank, sits Sherlock down in his office with a cup of coffee and leftover Sag Paneer from Lahore Kebab House. He introduces himself as Sergeant Lestrade, says Sherlock was right about the gardner (obvious) and casually hands him a unsolved case file.

“So go on,” Lestrade leans his elbows on the desk and nods toward the manilla folder. “Show off for me.” 

Sherlock solves it within five minutes.

Lestrade stares at him in awe, writes a few notes on a rizla. He taps the pen on the desk and looks once at the clock on the wall, says “Wanna do another?” .

\---

The cases are wonderful. They take up space, Sherlock lets the work consume him whole, sublimates all superfluous thoughts and urges into the The Work. It mollifies Sherlock’s fear of idleness, the paralysis of boredom.

He gets shot at, occasionally stabbed, but it’s all fine. Sherlock suspects he’ll die quite quickly this way, which should be disturbing but its not. Not really. It’s exciting, like playing a game and no one, not even Sherlock, knows the rules.

 

The drugs get to him first, but really it was only a matter of time.

 

\---

 

He wakes up on a hospital cot, the IV is pushing something cool into his veins, and Sherlock has the distinct feeling that he’s being watched. Mycroft, he assumes, perhaps Lestrade. Honestly, he doesn’t remember much.

Being kicked out of a crime scene. _Have you eaten, at all, in a month? You’re not coming in here, not like that._ Sally Donovan’s voice ringing in his ear as unwilling concern worked hard to overcome annoyance. _You know if Lestrade catches you off your tits at crime scene again, you can forget your little hobby._

The last thing he recalls is ordering chips from a street vendor. Bit anti-climactic as incidental overdoses go. Wouldn’t have been an issue if he’d remembered to keep hydrated. Or fed, possibly. He’s fairly certain he mixed incompatible medications by accident, Sherlock stopped paying attention to that a while back. He actually _can’t_ remember his last proper meal, and maybe that’s a problem.

His head is throbbing, there’s no where on his skin that doesn’t prick with the frustrating need to be scratched.

“Are you feeling better?”

Sherlock looks over to the all too familiar voice, his father sits with his hands clasped around Sherlock’s limp arm. Worse, oh god, so much worse than Mycroft.

Father. Father and his simplicity, his soft-spoken demeanor, his kind, kind, eyes, the way he could barely stand to see Sherlock with cuts and bruises when he was a toddler. Would spoil him with chocolate biscuits and hours of board games when Sherlock caught flu. When the school’s behavioral specialist sent home a letter diagnosing Sherlock with sociopathic tendencies, father took the paper, shredded it. _You’re a fine boy, and let no one say differently. I wonder if this rot would do well for papier mache._ It’s a wonder how Sherlock bloomed ill from such goodness.

Sherlock tamps down on the desire to squirm and rip the IV line out, to scratch his crawling skin. 

“I’m well enough to leave, perhaps you should tell the nurse I’m awake,” he says patiently, mostly wanting father to leave the stuffy room smelling of antiseptic and hospital linens so that Sherlock won’t have to look at those sad eyes.

“Sherlock--”

“Ugh, don’t,” Sherlock tries to cut in, not keen to hear an intervention speech. 

“You know your mother and I love you dearly. We flew straight in from our line dance workshop in Massachusetts when we heard. ” father continues, heedless, “We’d never recover if something terrible were to happen to you. Why must you carry on with it so?”

He pets Sherlock’s hair, his hands are aged, growing blunted from high blood pressure. Sherlock twitches under the touch, undeserving of his father’s endless patience.

“I don’t know anymore,” Sherlock says after some time, it’s been ages since he was last completely honest. The childish need for parental comfort rears its head, reaches out. “I thought it helped, but now I don’t know.”

Father nods, thankfully not pressing the matter any further. He pats Sherlock’s head. “I was your age once, a thousand years ago. Constantly going about, because that’s the way it is when you’re young and life is terribly complicated. Only keep in mind that the world is filled with beauty.” Sherlock rolls his eyes, but father disregards the gesture. “Stop sometimes. Notice it.”

Sherlock remembers beauty, faintly. The honeybee’s comb, the hexagonal wax cells Mother would harvest, set out on the table next to freshly baked bread. The honeywand submerged in amber.

Christmas in London, Trafalgar square illuminated by fairy lights. Air smelling only of frost.

The purposefully distorted image of Victor brushing his teeth wearing a towel around his hips, giving Sherlock a foamy smile in the mirror.

\---

Sherlock thinks it’s the worst sort of prank when Mycroft sends him off to a private detox facility in Pensacola, Florida. The staff quickly learn to give Sherlock a wide berth, as do the the other patients. Sherlock is very vocal in his opinion that pineapples are not meant to be the focus of interior decoration in a facility full of junkies and drunks. Juvenile. Unsightly. And how is kayaking supposed to calm him? All three feet worth of legroom and being stung by jellyfish only enrage him further, he steals the Koi from the fountain and places them in the toilets. Sherlock heard the first surprised scream while lying in bed, and found that part at least gratifying.

They diagnose him with Antisocial Personality Disorder, presenting with comorbid depression, mania, etcetera, etcetera. The psychiatrists try desperately to sort out his classifications on the DSM-IV axis. 

The anti-depression pills are useless, Sherlock decides this without even trying them. 

Two weeks in he meets Martha Hudson, and immediately likes her. She sits across from him without a word, looks at her watch. He knows right off that she’s European. No American would wear that hat with all the lavender flowers and tulle springing from the rim, not to a rehab facility for sure. Irish, perhaps, the claddagh ring sits heavy on her finger.

“Supposed to meet a friend here, perhaps she’s not well today.” Well, he was a bit off, English and not Irish.

“Three females are currently out. One tried to drink the antibacterial hand sanitizer, another typically sneaks out about this time behind the pools to smoke marijuana. Smuggles it in from an outside source. Last one is at this moment having sex with the floor nurse, but that shouldn’t last long. Erectile dysfunction. So, which one is your one?”

She looks at Sherlock, smiles conspiratorially, “Oh dear. Wouldn’t you just love to know?”

He regards her for a moment, sits back in his chair, “You’re the smuggler. _You,_ are the smuggler?”

“Brassieres can hide more than just your bits, dearie. I’m Martha, Martha Hudson.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” he reaches across the table shakes her delicate hand.

“Oh, lovely name. Your mum must be the creative type. Poker?” She gestures toward the deck of cards in the middle of the table.

Sherlock waves about the room. “Rehab center, do I look like I’m carrying cash?”

Mrs. Hudson shrugs it away, “I’ve got a packet of sweeties and half a box of marlboros. Interested?”

 

She takes him for all he has. Which is nothing, so the loss is only to his pride In the meantime he was able to piece together her failing marriage, the husband’s infidelity, his drug cartel, and her fear of the man. She confirms his deductions one after another with a growing sense of awe.

“What is it you said you do for work?” Mrs. Hudson passes over a cinnamon sweet.

“Detective work of sorts.”

She glances about the room, leans forward and whispers, “You ever go in for private cases?” 

“Possibly,” Sherlock shrugs, plays the game. “Definitely, if you’re willing to part with those cigarettes.”

Mrs. Hudson grins, wraps the pack in a kerchief and passes it to Sherlock.

\---

Mike Stamford and his hideous, too-short tie. His gentle, completely spherical face, and, “This is my friend,” he gestures toward the invalided army doctor at the end of the lab bench. “John Watson.”

\---


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d be happy to stay here in this bubble where for a few intense minutes, he had everything he wanted.

They get on well. It might, possibly, be a genuine miracle.

John even finds Sherlock charming, says as much on his miserable blog, right there next to “mad, arrogant, and really quite rude.” Which honestly is quite hypocritical being that John himself seems to live with one hand on a trigger and the other reaching out to push people away.

There’s a bit of an awkward moment while they wait for a serial murderer to turn out outside of Angelo’s whereSherlock, for a moment, thinks John is chatting him up.

He’s been flirted with before, Sherlock knows what an awkward line sounds like, has found himself on the receiving end of quite a few. John looks for confirmation of Sherlock’s singularity, says, “You’re unattached, like me. Fine. Good.”

Good? Sherlock’s heart gives a nervous flutter.

It’s been ages. Thirteen years, to be more precise. Sherlock never took on another lover after Victor, no matter how sometimes his skin craved the touch of another hand. He thought of it, sure, would be easy to find a willing enough partner. Once he even went as far to don the grungy black tee and tattered denims that club goers seemed to like so much, positioned himself at some pub’s bar in soho and waited to be propositioned. He was still freshly rehabbed, craved cocaine constantly, and needed a distraction. It took all of ten minutes and the a-typical, “Can I buy you a drink?” 

Forty-two, American, married with three children, in London on advert marketing business and taking advantage of anonymity. A silver pendant depicting St. Joseph holding the Lily dangled from around his neck. Ironic, being that St. Joseph is generally viewed at the patron pietist of fidelity. 

He’d let the man lead him under the stairs, let him lean forward in hope of a kiss.

Sherlock looked at the strange mouth, lips parted slightly, and visibly grimaced. The man jerked backward, said, “What? There something between my teeth?” He prodded about a molar with a fingernail.

“I don’t know you,” Sherlock said, the music too loud to be heard over it. “I don’t even know who you are.” 

Sherlock left the man standing there, went home, stared at the wall in revulsion.

 

John makes such an ungainly scene of backpedalling when Sherlock politely deters the come-on that Sherlock thinks perhaps he’d read the innuendo entirely wrong.

After all, this is not his area, and there are serial killers to be chased instead. There’s also the matter of resolving John’s psychosomatic limp. It must be so troublesome poking about with that geezerly cane. Sherlock knows the troubles and failures of the human body, his own transport is consistently disappointing with its limits. 

He knows well the feeling of living inside of a vessel that seems too large and demanding, only to feel starved and alone.

 

\---

Lestrade, irksome and cleverer than Sherlock gives him credit for, shows up for an impromptu drugs bust at 221B. He also manages to bust John’s mistaken attempt to defend Sherlock’s “good name.”

Sherlock invades John’s space, tries to startle him into shutting up. He feels the flicker of embarrassment, the unwilling worry that this might be the thing that sends John running. Dead women who scratch their dead daughters’ names into hardwood using only their fingernails? Brilliant. Amazing.

Junkie flatmate? Might be a dealbreaker.

“No,” disbelief and disappointment. John’s eyes flick down to Sherlock’s mouth, he leans backward a few centimeters. “You?”

Lestrade looks on from Sherlock’s chair, smiling in spite of the scene presented in front of him. Like he knows something that Sherlock doesn’t, which is impossible, so he dismisses it, but it still abrades his already worked nerves. That conspiratory smile, John’s bafflement; Sherlock tells himself that they have it coming when he wanders off into the cab of a serial killer without a word.

\---

It’s probably not the most on thing to gamble one’s life, and Mycroft would be very cross to deal with Sherlock’s poisoned corpse. 

Sherlock looks at the little capsule pinched between his fingers. The cabbie rambles on, and whatever he has to say it doesn’t matter because Sherlock has got the pill against his lips. It doesn’t smell bitter like narcotics, it doesn’t smell like anything. Sherlock is almost sure he’s right, almost but not quite, and wouldn’t it be fun to beat the man at his own game?

Still, Sherlock wonders what his last thought would be of if he’s wrong. Probably something dull, probably something along the lines of should’ve deleted my browser history. 

He doesn’t even register the sound of a bullet until the cabbie is falling backward, blood spreading like a fan underneath him.

\---

 

Sherlock learns a lot about John Watson their first night together.

John favors Szechuan when eating Chinese.

John’s has 87% damage in the axillary nerve, resulting in loss of sensation to the immediate surrounding area, but excludes sympathetic radial dysfunction.

John has a father he doesn’t speak to. Hasn’t done for approximately 14 years, and the lack of communication is deliberate going by the way the muscles in John’s jaw seize when Sherlock casually asks after his parents.

 

John Watson will shoot a person dead to keep Sherlock safe. John knows the price of being a good man, and decided a long time ago that he wasn’t one.

John is wrong about a lot of things.

And Sherlock is wrong too, because for the life of him, Sherlock can’t stop the treacherous thing that recognises warmth for what it is, lifts its head, and takes notice.

 

\---

 

John has a gash about his skull from being struck by one of General Shan’s assassins. The blood has coagulated, turned sticky and brown. His hair is matted down into the wound where it stretches past the temple.

“I’ve done stitches before, on corpses of course,” Sherlock offers from his perch on the bench, watches John wince as cold water runs over the cut. “If you wanted, I could--”

“Nope,” John says tersely, “There’s no way I’m letting you near my nog with a sharp object.” He turns his head under the tap, the water is stained dull and rusty before turning clear again. “Doesn’t need suturing anyway. Dab of antibiotic cream, a few plasters, a nice long e-mail begging forgiveness from the nice lady who went on a date with me and instead ended up kidnapped by a couple black market assassins.”

“Karen? She’s fine,” Sherlock protests in confusion.

“She was almost shot through by a spear!”

Sherlock furrows his brow, considering his misjudgment, “I did find it odd that she was crying, but I thought perhaps she was just extraordinarily happy to see me. Under the circumstances, I mean.”

“Sherlock Holmes, those most certainly were not tears of joy.” John shoulders quiver slightly, like he trying very hard not to laugh. 

“I don’t understand,” Sherlock continues, picks up an apple from a bowl and examines it. 

“And her name’s not Karen, it’s Sarah, you arse,” John turns off the water. He tries righting himself, blinks hard, and stumbles like a drunk. Sherlock slides from the bench and steadies John with fingers against his belly in case John decides to tip forward and become more acquainted with the kitchen floor.

“All right?” Sherlock asks, stooping to get a good look at John’s eyes. The pupils show dilation. “Do you have a concussion?”

John laughs, “No, m’fine.”

“Are you feeling the sudden urge to vomit or urinate on yourself?” Sherlock is certain those would be indicators of such a neurological condition.

Instead John leans back, smiles dopily at Sherlock and pinches the curl over Sherlock’s right ear. “You’ve got nice hair, you know that?”

“John--” but John looks consideringly and buries the hand in Sherlock’s hair, scratches him like one might a pleased mutt. Instead of pulling away, Sherlock goes stock still. Says, “Huh,” in a whispered release of breath. The hand on his scalp is warm, steady, he’s always had sensitive follicles. It’d be easy for John to draw Sherlock closer, pull down, press up and against and--

“Has your face always been this fuzzy? Where’ve your eyes gone? Honestly, I can’t remember. Sorry. You know, maybe I only needed half of that Oxylan.”

Realisation dawns: Opiod. Probably leftover from surgery on his shoulder. That would explain the sudden lapse in self-control. Sherlock ducks John’s right hand as it reaches out to test the hair on the other side of his head. “Think we need to get you in bed now, John.” He takes John’s arm over his shoulder and leads the way.

“I was shot,” John says loudly, “Right here, right bloody ‘ere.” He rolls his neck, looks down to his shoulder. The tip in balance causes Sherlock to stumble, he hits his knee, swears and rolls his eyes as John continues on uninhibited by their proceedings. “Felt pretty rubbish, let me tell you.”

“Try not to, it sounds dull, could you just--” Sherlock drags John up onto the landing, grunts when John settles his weight against him and forces Sherlock to lead him into the bedroom. He tries to get John to sit down on the mattress alone, but John won’t release his arm from around Sherlock’s neck and shoulders so Sherlock curses at him some more and they both sit. There’s an unpacked box in the corner, a picture with his sister standing next to a cactus pinned to the desk. Such meagre possessions for someone so full of experiences, like John never expected to find a home to collect his dust in.

“I remember thinking I had died,” John looks at Sherlock, lamplight limns his face with gold. A dark bruise is already mottling the skin around the wound. “There was pain, a lot of it, people screaming around me. Gunshots, everything smelled of fire and blood and fear, fucking humanity just falling to bits in front of me. And I remember thinking I had died.” He says it slowly, pointedly, the memory isn’t something to be trusted, and leans his head against Sherlock.

Sherlock swallows, unsure of the burst of emotions caged in his chest because he’s absolutely certain John has never said this to anyone. John’s high on painkillers, disoriented with it, and it shouldn’t count. He shouldn’t be telling him any of this because Sherlock isn’t someone you trust to say these things to.

He pats John’s knee, manages to sound agreeable, “Well, you’re still quite alive last I recall. So.. Good on you. Congratulations on not dying.” Sherlock extracts himself from beside John, his breath tickling Sherlock’s throat beginning to border on distracting.

“Glad you found me,” John slurs, neglects stripping of his trousers and lies on top of the sheets. “Shouldn’t have liked to been killed again.”

“Of course I found you.” Losing John wasn’t really an option. “Who else would make sure I don’t blow the flat down to ground level.” John laughs, mumbles something unintelligible and snuffles against his pillow. Sherlock opens the door.

 

“I shouldn’t have said that,” John calls out at the last minute, “The other day, when that manky twat had us in his office.”

“Said what?” Sherlock shifts awkwardly on his feet when he remembers Sebastian Wilkes’ sneering smile. He always made fun of Sherlock, even before Sherlock opened his mouth to dissect him in turn.

“You called me your friend, and I corrected you, I said I was your colleague.”

“You are my colleague. As much as possible given that you’re an idiot.”

“Shuddup and listen,” John raises his hand in what might was intended as a forceful gesture before letting it fall limply to the bed. “You told him I was your friend, and I said no, nope, jiss just your colleague. And really I should have just strangled him with that £ 1,000 tie, told the blighter he isn’t fooling anyone with his fancy bank, and his five figure cheques, because he’s obviously just compensating for his wee dick.”

Sherlock’s mouth falls open. 

“You’re amazing and brilliant and you have your own website, and what’s he have? A prick the size of a candle corn, that’s what. You’re great though. People should say that to you,” he yawns and his eyes shut tight. 

“I, um, ah,” Sherlock stammers, regroups and decides to say nothing.

John is snoring softly, lips parted to take in air and release it. He looks younger in his sleep this way. Sherlock has been woken up by John’s Afghanistan nightmares through the course of nine weeks. He shouts and twists his sheets, sometimes wanders about, but when Sherlock finds John he’s always back in bed with his lips pinched closed and brow drawn down.

John’s arm rests in a line over the right side of the bed, across the pillows.

\----

 

Cases come, some better than others, some bizarre and hideous. John stands at his side, protective, curious. He never calls Sherlock names, never makes fun in a cruel way because John isn’t one to joke at another’s expense. 

There’s something comforting, domestically pleasant, when John makes dinner and forces Sherlock to watch terrible films. Laughter is easy, and bit by bit they open a little more. 

After being triggered all week from a case involving an abusive parent, John tells Sherlock about his father. An angry drunk who would spend every cheque before groceries could be bought. John walked in on his mother nearly being struck by the man, and he stepped in between only to take the beating instead. This happened irregularly until John was old enough to strike back, and finally the mother put an end to it all. Divorced and moved north, John never spoke to him again.

“I don’t know why I’m talking about it. Haven’t done in years.” 

Sherlock doesn’t doubt it for a second, John clings to his stoicism like one might a life raft. Vulnerability is terrifying, Sherlock knows this because he’s lived by it.

“Your dysfunctional childhood isn’t exactly an icebreaker I imagine,” Sherlock cheeks to break the tension. 

John laughs, a real laugh, one that makes his eyes crinkle and face brighten. “Yeah, a real comfort you are.”

“I could be your new therapist,” Sherlock smiles into his mug. “Much better than your last I’d wager, on account I get you into loads of mortal danger on occasion. The most adventurous exercise she had you do was start that terrible blog.”

“Lovely. I wouldn’t quit your day job is all I’m saying.” John sighs and looks at the fire for a few long moments. “What about you? Any terrible secrets? Hidden pain consuming your dark and twisted soul that you care to tell me about?”

Sherlock thinks, his thumbs traces the lip of the mug. The fire crackles, casts the flat in wavering shadows.

“No.”

\---

 

Mycroft nudges pieces of glass aside with the polished toe of his shoe, clicks his tongue disapprovingly. “Well Sherlock, this is quite the mess.”

“You say that like it’s my fault. I wasn’t exactly planning on ending my evening with explosives shattering the windows.” Sherlock uses tweezers to pick at his forearm where a few shards of glass found a home.

“Where’s John?” Mycroft asks casually, swinging his brolly about before leaning it against a chair.

Sherlock grimaces, “Out.” They’d fought, John left. He’s off at Sarah’s, faffing about with her breasts not doubt and Sherlock doesn’t care at all. No, not even a little. 

He wonders when John will come back.

Mycroft nods because he already understands this, makes it his business to keep tabs of their comings and goings in the city. Mycroft takes off his suit coat, undoes his cuffs and rolls them to his elbows, crouches down in front of Sherlock. He bats Sherlock’s hand away, takes the tweezers and begins removing the glass, dabs at the blood with gauze. 

“He’s been good for you, hasn’t he,” it’s not a rhetorical question, so Sherlock says nothing. “The steadfast sort. A good soldier, always ready to follow you into battle.”

“A better doctor than you for sure,” Sherlock grits out when Mycroft slips the largest shard of glass from his skin. The blood immediately begins to run out, weeping scarlet over white and Sherlock has always been fascinated by contrast. He likes seeing his own blood, it’s comforting in a way to be able to connect pain to proof. Tangible, obvious, when so often hurting hides where Sherlock cannot see or touch it.

“Be careful there, William,” Mycroft says gently, using Sherlock’s first name the way he only does when they call truce and speak as brothers. “Something big is coming, larger than you and I both. Now isn’t the time to get distracted, there’s work to be done.”

“I haven’t the slightest what you mean by that. I’m not distracted, I’m here aren’t I, and as soon as you’re done torturing me I can find out who wants my attention.” He looks at the wreck of the sitting room, unsalvageable books, knick knacks scattered. 

Mycroft holds him by the wrist, smears ointment over the neat slices and begins wrapping the arm in sterile gauze. “You’re more damaged then you let on.”

“A little bit of skin is easy work for exploding glass.” Sherlock looks away, knowing Mycroft is saying one thing and meaning another.

“Of course you’re right,” Mycroft gives a closed lipped smile and squeezes Sherlock’s wrist once, “The flesh is weak. So easily broken, we animals.”

\---

Something inside of Sherlock recoils at the disappointment written so clearly on John’s face. Angry because Sherlock is enjoying the game, angry because Sherlock can’t afford to care about the people being victimised in the process. 

He only has so much space to work with, if he lets the caring in, there might not be enough room for the logic as well and Sherlock can’t let that happen. Can’t allow himself to get emotional because that’s when mistakes happen.

It was a slap in his face when the old woman was blown up, he’d tried to tell her to shut up, and she died and maybe that’s his fault. He’s sorry that she’s dead and there’s no one to apologise to for it.

He can’t help that she was chosen as a game piece to be played against him. Collateral damage is unavoidable, and John must know this as both doctor and soldier. Sherlock can not dwell on the past, the things he can’t change, the external circumstances he has no control over, it’s more simple to shut the door to guilt and work.

But John cares too much, wants too much from Sherlock, and is Sherlock is all wrong in the spot where a heart should be.

\---

 

Except that’s a lie, one Sherlock was telling even if he thought it to be honest.

Sherlock realises this as John peels away his coat revealing the semtex underneath, and Sherlock feels panic rise desperate and startling in his throat. His pulse rings in his ears even as he denies having a heart. 

Moriarty smirks, “We both know that’s not quite true.” He doesn’t even have to glance back to John. He only fixes Sherlock with big, dark eyes, terrifying intelligence sparkling through, and reads Sherlock as though he’s scrap paper. Moriarty makes death threats sound like a carefully crafted flirtation.

Moriarty knows it’s no longer a game now that John’s life is the price being paid to raise the stakes. 

John looks only at Sherlock. John nods and Sherlock targets the vest. 

\---

John is furious.

He doesn’t talk to Sherlock the entire cab ride home, sits as far away from him as possible. John’s fist clenches, his fingers flex, tap frenetically on top of his thigh before balling up again. Thin lips set in a stern way, his jawline more pronounced because of it. Sherlock doesn’t understand. John should be happy that they’ve narrowly escaped death once again. Anticlimactic as showdowns go, ending in a phone call and all, but a stroke of luck nonetheless.

Sherlock follows behind John on the stairs, registers each stamp of his feet, the defensive posture of his shoulders.

John pushes the door open, the handle knocks loudly against the wall, ricochets back toward Sherlock. He only misses being hit because John is now grabbing him out of the way by his collar.

“What do you think you’re--” Sherlock wheezes when John pins him hard against the door, slamming it shut.

“Don’t, just shut up,” John shoves at him again, fingers hard and pulling at Sherlock’s shirt. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and shakes his head once. “You can’t do that, okay? Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Sherlock’s voice is breathier than it ought to be. John’s body hemmed up against his, blatantly aggressive, it’s doing funny things to Sherlock’s head.

“Don’t lie to me. Don’t go out on your own to meet psychopaths who blow up old ladies.”

“I didn’t lie, I didn’t say anything.”

“It’s fucking the same in my book. You’ll get killed, you’ll get us both killed.”

Sherlock is beginning to get annoyed now and tries to push off the wall to no effect. “As you may have noticed, we’re both alive. See?” Sherlock uses a hand to pinch the skin on John’s neck. It turns pink and fades, Sherlock wants to make an identical mark with his teeth. “Not dreaming.”

“You’ll have us in twin graves--”

“Why are you so angry?”

“--like a couple of shot dogs, side by side.”

Sherlock gives in, let’s John deal with his weight as he slumps against the wall. “I knew he wasn’t going to have me snuffed, he’s too infatuated for that. I didn’t factor in that he’d use you as leverage. Do you think I would just let that go.”

“Yes!”

It hurts his feelings, John’s underestimation. 

“Then why didn’t I run!” Sherlock shouts, grabs back and holds John’s collar the same way his is being held. He wants to push him away. Beat him over the head because now Sherlock is angry too, it’s been years since he’s had a blind spot. He’s had nothing, nothing, to be used against him, nothing he’s owed anyone and now there’s John. Alive and in front of Sherlock, licking his lips, and making Sherlock afraid and grateful and feeling so much. “If you think I care so little, why didn’t I run when you told me to? Would’ve been easier not dealing with both an idiot flatmate and criminal psychopath meddling in my business. Are you angry at me that you got kidnapped and strapped down with semtex? Fine! That’s my fault, yes, why else would he have picked you? I care whether or not you get blown to smithereens. I care whether or not I’d have to take responsibility for it. Does it please you to know that? Hm? Or would you rather continue shoving me into Mrs. Hudson’s moulding because you think you’ll get your point across better that way!”

John doesn’t let him go, but his eyes drop to Sherlock’s mouth and suddenly all air in the room is gone. He can feel John’s breath against his lips and yes, Sherlock thinks, okay. John is pulling him tighter than what they ought to be, their thighs are beginning to overlap, and surely he notices that. John tilts his chin up, they’re both panting a little and why is that? 

“I’m not your pet,” John says, eyes fierce and alarmingly blue.

“He said that, not me. I never thought you were.”

John lets go, backs away rubbing the nape of his neck. “Just tell me what you’re planning next time, yeah? Can’t help you if I don’t know. Sorry about--” he gestures toward Sherlock and won’t meet his eye. “That. You know.” He turns and jogs upstairs.

Sherlock runs a finger over the spot where John’s knuckles brushed his throat.

\---

Sherlock doesn’t think about kissing Irene Adler, even though she shows up completely nude and with a mind to rival Sherlock’s own. Then there was the surprise drugging. Definitely puts him off kissing her, that and his own preferences in gender.

He actively doesn’t think about it when Lestrade and John are somehow hauling him up the stairs. Sherlock doesn’t remember when he began levitating of his own free will, and it’s very good of them both to make sure he doesn’t run into things. He feels very clumsy.

“Is my mouth working?” Sherlock asks them.

“Yep,” Lestrade wheezes, “Unfortunately. Your legs on the other hand, maybe you could try to bloody stand you heavy bastard.”

“It doesn’t feel like it’s working. I thought maybe it fell off.” He laughs at the ludicrousy.

“What did she give him?” Lestrade asks John irritably. John only grumbles something about a sedative with hallucinogenic properties. Sherlock lets his head lawl sideways onto Lestrade’s shoulder so he can get a better look at John.

“John,” Sherlock says urgently, because this is important, “Your mouth is a mucous membrane. Doesn’t that sound awful?”

“Mmhm, few more steps Sherlock and we can get you to bed.”

Sherlock watches John push air from between his lips, his pinched pink mouth, Sherlock is sure John must be good at kissing. Must be, if the string of women are anything to go by. Sherlock wants to touch his mouth, hasn’t done it before and it really is lovely sitting there on his face. John’s jawline looks like something to nibble on. Sherlock takes his hand from around John’s shoulder, aims his index finger for the philtrum of John’s lips.

“What on earth are you-- damn it Sherlock!” Sherlock misses and his finger has a confused moment with John’s sclera. It’s disappointing in the extreme

John flinches away, blinking the eye awkwardly and rubbing it with heel of his palm. The sudden unevenness of balance causes all of Sherlock’s weight to fall on Lestrade, they pitch sideways against the stairwell wall.

Sherlock has Lestrade boxed in, hands on either side of his head and their stomachs pressed together. Their faces are close despite Lestrade craning the back of his skull against the wallpaper like he might suddenly find more space. He has a nice mouth too, much less interesting than John’s but objectively it’s fine. 

“Oh,” Sherlock says happily, “Hello.”

“Someone get the camera phone!” Lestrade pushes Sherlock’s waist gently to move him, but Sherlock feels heavy all of a sudden and just leans in closer. ‘“Jesus and Mary, you dopey nutter, come off.” Sherlock’s brow skitters across a stubbly cheek as he tries to right his head from where it wants to droop.

“Oi!” John cries out, “Greg, get off him!””

“Off him? I’m the victim here if you haven’t noticed.”

Sherlock laughs and whispers, “Who’s Greg?” Lestrade rolls his eyes and tries to get an arm around Sherlock, and that’s nice and flattering and all but, “Isn’t it customary to ask if someone wants to be whipped before whipping them? Bit rude, don’t you think?”

“He’s cobblers,” Lestrade calls over Sherlock’s shoulder. 

“I hope you’re enjoying yourself there, should I leave you two alone?”

Lestrade keeps nudging Sherlock, keeps trying to turn his head every which way because Sherlock is tired and can’t be bothered by _personal space._ “Fantastic, because I only thought my night was going to end with pizza and telly. Instead I’m spending it with London’s crossest veteran and Nancy fucking Drew’s first acid trip, and, and, The British Government Himself ringing me every five bloody minutes. See! You see that?” Sherlock vaguely hears Mussorgsky’s _Night on Bald Mountain_ trilling in mobile tones. “Twelfth time in one hour, swear to God. What’s he calling _me_ for when he’s got you?”

This seems to calm the martial edge in John’s voice and he laughs quietly. “Well, you’re nicer than me.”

“Yup.”

“I like cobbler,” Sherlock closes his eyes when John’s hands come around his hips to pull him off Lestrade. “Peach.”

He doesn’t remember much after that.

\---

He only poisons John in the pursuit of science, knowledge, and he’ll be damned if he’s stuck with only Henry Knight to keep himself company during a drug induced psychosis.

Of course the attempt is botched, and therefore it shouldn’t count. John hasn’t put two and two together yet, so maybe that one will fly under the radar.

Sherlock heads upstairs to their room, that’s right, just the one. _More economic, you’ll probably sleep all of two hours anyways. Waste of money, a spare room._ Seemed like an awful lot of excusing to make when Sherlock hadn’t even said one word about the arrangement. 

He’s tired, somewhat nauseated by the second dose of noxious gas at Dewer’s Hollow, ears ringing from the explosion that blew Dr. Frankland into smithereens. It was stunning, the harsh bloom of fire surging upward, uncaringly destructive. Sherlock had recoiled in shock.

John and Lestrade stood back and watched warily, the sight of a man being ripped apart in flames not at all unfamiliar to their eyes. John’s trauma forged in warfare, Lestrade’s while being a young officer during the IRA bombings.

John is sitting at the end of his bed when Sherlock enters their room. He’s clenching and releasing his hands, more compulsively than is his usual habit

“They won’t stop spasming, ” John sniffs and watches his hands tremble. “You all right?”

“Mh,” Sherlock nods, sheds his coat onto a chair. He ought to shower, wash the smell of damp wood and smoke from his skin, but the pillows lumped against the headrest of the bed look far too inviting. He considers sleeping in his suit, but the thought of his shoulders and legs constricted in bespoke tailoring encourages Sherlock to take the extra few steps to strip down to his briefs. Close-quarters modesty ranks low on Sherlock’s list of social considerations, John has seen him in various states of undress, usually hunched over the bathroom sinks while John cleans gravel from abraded skin or stitches up small punctures made from small knives. 

John watches him now, eyes too tired to look at anything else than the movement in front of him. He watches the shirt fall to the floor, sighs and shakes his head minutely. Sherlock kicks away trousers, leaves the socks on because the floor is cold. John’s fingers seize up, shake, and ball into fists.

Unthinking, Sherlock steps in close to John, crouches, touches his fingers over the thin skin covering metacarpals. “You were triggered,” he closes his own palms together, cradling John’s hands between them to still the tremors. “This isn’t Afghanistan.”

“You’re wrong,” John whispers. “But that’s okay.”

They stare at each other for some time, perhaps any other occasion it would be odd, but John seems too drained to do anything other than accept the touch. They stay still, trapped in a moment the way their hands are trapped together, at once grounded together and a million miles apart.

“What did you see at the Hollow? You said ‘Not you,’ who did you mean?”

“I don’t remember,” Sherlock lies.

“It was him, wasn’t it? Moriarty.”

The rain has begun to take up sullen beat against the windows, John’s hands are steady and warm now, and Sherlock doesn’t answer at all.

“Does he frighten you?” John asks.

“No,” Sherlock lies once more, “Of course not,” but he’s fairly certain that he’ll lose everything at Moriarty’s hand, because what could such a mad mind, once set free of moral trappings, be capable of? “Does he frighten you?”

John answers immediately, “Not nearly as much as you do.”

Sherlock shrugs, gives John a small smile, “I get that a lot.”

“No, not like..” John’s fingers straighten in the cocoon of Sherlock’s palms, they slide out and hook tightly around Sherlock’s wrists. John doesn’t look him in the eye anymore, he furrows his brow at their hands and Sherlock doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t want to, and John tugs lightly. Sherlock shuffles on his knees until he’s looking at John’s downturned eyes instead of the top of his head. 

“Afghanistan was burning, always going to sleep not knowing for certain you’ll wake up, but it was beautiful, fucking scary, and you’re that to me.”

That sounds terrible to Sherlock. “You’re comparing me to the thing that traumatised and nearly killed you. Perfect. No wonder you’re poetry goes over so well with your girlfriends.” John looks at him and thinks of destruction, bombs cracking bricks apart, bullets piercing kevlar to reach into the tender flesh underneath. Men dying underneath blue sky and scorching sun, and this is Sherlock; annihilation, massacre.

“No,” John looks at him tiredly, “It was the only place I ever felt like I belonged.”

Sherlock doesn’t ask what this means because John has slid a hand into his hair. “Why am I doing that?” he whispers. 

Sherlock tilts his chin up, and for a few heart-twisting moments he believes John means to kiss him. It would be stupid, a dumb risk for the potential ruination of Sherlock’s only real friendship. 

It would be amazing. He wants it so much, and having after all the wanting could only feel incredible. 

“Sorry,” John jerks his hands away, rubs them through his own hair instead. “God, sorry. I know you don’t--” he tears the sheets back and scrambles under them and Sherlock has no idea what he’s done wrong. 

“I wasn’t--” Sherlock stands awkwardly, tries to sort out what the right thing to say. “Okay.” 

“Right, yeah,” John clears his throat, “We’re both knackered is all. Just forget everything, forget I said anything.”

 _I don’t want to,_ Sherlock thinks and doesn’t say, and doesn’t forget.

 

\---

 

There’s not enough time, Sherlock knows this even as he and John run through the night. 

London becomes something that wants to clench Sherlock between its jagged teeth, chew him up, spit him out, and he’s going to have to let it happen. John is going to have to watch, or he’ll die as well. 

He can’t let that happen, ever.

Sherlock is covered in someone else’s blood, sprawled like a suicide on the pavement. His fingers are limp, going numb from both cold and strained circulation as he continues to not have a pulse.

John is screaming.

John is running toward him.

Sherlock is leaving. 

This doesn’t feel like winning at all.

“Let me through, he’s my _friend,”_ John’s fingers strain and circle Sherlock’s wrist. He holds tight and Sherlock struggles to fight the urge to move. 

Take me home, Sherlock thinks desperately and dies.

\----

He had almost forgotten what it felt like, being alone.

There are years of alone.

\----

He goes to sleep, he wakes up. 

Some of Moriarty’s strings are most easily shredded than others. 

He goes to sleep, he wakes up.

Sherlock takes down four of Moriarty’s assets at once, they’ll never see the outside of a prison cell for the rest of their lives. He is elated for a moment, until he’s sitting on the hotel bed and there’s only silence; thunderous, oppressive, trapped between four unfamiliar walls.

He goes to sleep, he wakes up.

His cover is blown for the first time and Mycroft’s men must extract him. Sherlock doesn’t remember that part, he comes around on a hospital bed in Hamburg. Mycroft’s hand is over his, he’s fallen asleep with his head on Sherlock’s cot.

It’s the first time Sherlock has been touched by anything other than fists in months and months.

\----

 

“I don’t want to die,” Sherlock mumbles, the painkillers for his broken ribs are metabolising and he feels softer, lighter. 

Mycroft stares at him from the corner of the tiny hospital room, a folder in his hands, another mission. Another fake name. Another handful of months missing London, missing John.

“I would never let that happen,” Mycroft looks him hard in the eyes and says no more of it.

“I don’t feel real,” Sherlock muses, faces the ceiling and its discoloured tiles. “I’m here, and you and Mum and Dad, John, you’re all over there. And I don’t exist at all. Is it that not enough like death?” He’s learned not to ask Mycroft about John, Sherlock can’t afford the distraction of sentiment during these missions.

“Sleep now,” Mycroft tells him, flicks off the overhead light.

 

When Sherlock wakes up, he’s alone.

\----

He doesn’t kill anyone. Sherlock estimated he’d be forced into it, but the time has not come. These are terrible people, murderers, traffickers, and they take up valuable space and resources in the world and Sherlock can’t imagine losing sleep over their deaths. 

Still, at the end of the day it’s something of a comfort to not look at his hands and see them covered in blood.

\----

He doesn’t mean to, but Sherlock lays out the sheets of intel and missions in front of him and does the calculations. The papers and files fan out across the hideous tan linoleum, the cold ashes from Sherlock’s cigarette scatter harmlessly across the words.

Even if Sherlock were able to completely forgo any semblance of self-maitenance, he’ll still be dead for another year. Which is generous, more like one year and a half.

Sherlock methodically memorises each file, commits the information to the room in his mind where he keeps Moriarty’s web, and then he takes matchsticks to all the papers. He shuts off the lights, throws it all into the sink drain, and burns them. 

\---

He dreams about their last night before leaving Dartmoor and it’s monsters behind. 

Dream John doesn’t pull away, doesn’t tell Sherlock to forget. The hand in his hair is steady. 

“I would’ve died for you,” John whispers and presses their lips together. Sherlock knows it’s a dream because he can’t move or feel, can’t speak, he’s trapped inside of his body and he can’t ask John to come to bed. He wouldn’t be able to feel John’s fingers slide under the band of his pants and pet over the skin covering his hips, farther down.

“Why can’t you stay,” John says in his ear. “Please.” But Sherlock is fading away quick.

Even in his dreams, he’s always either going or gone.

\----

Two years.

Mycroft drags him away with lashes on his back and hair longer than he’s ever let it grow. Sherlock collapses in the shower at Hotel Prie Mariu. Their flight back to London doesn’t leave until dawn, and Sherlock _can’t,_ he’s so fucking exhausted, he can’t _think._

Mycroft throws the door open upon hearing the loud noise Sherlock’s body creates as he falls to the floor. The water pelts the swollen wounds on his back.

“Oh Sherlock,” Mycroft says softly, he rolls his shirt sleeves and steps into the spray. He blinks water from his eyes, lays Sherlock’s head over his sodden suit trousers, carefully washes and combs his fingers through Sherlock’s matted hair. Sherlock allows it, feels like a primary schooler when he’d come home with fresh blood on his lip after school fights. Mycroft would take him to the loo and wash the cuts, press a bag of frozen peas over colorful bruises. He’d never been bullied, even as a boy Mycroft wore his solitary confidence like well-fitted gloves. Mycroft’s intelligence was bottomless, calculating, and frightening, where Sherlock’s was graceless and impetuous. Sherlock was obvious and flamboyant, and Mycroft has always been insidious. Children recognized something precarious in Mycroft, and stayed well away.

Only once did Sherlock see a boy attempt to intimidate his way into Mycroft’s space, and was abruptly met with a hand at his throat. Mycroft whispered something in his ear, and the boy came away white-faced and shaking.

 

Mycroft shields water from Sherlock’s eyes. 

Sherlock makes it to bed with an arm slung around Mycroft’s shoulders. Outside, the Curonian lagoon pushes its waters against the shore, every erosion of earth a grateful sigh as it’s swallowed whole by the sea.

\----

 

Things happen too quickly and all at once, life expands and topples, it has done exactly this in Sherlock’s absence. 

Sherlock stands next to Mary Morstan, the blood on his face is beginning to dry, and he’s too late. The tenuous thread of potential that burned inside of him for these two wretched years, it snaps when Sherlock sees the glint of a diamond ring. One that John plans to slip over Mary’s delicate knuckle and promise forever to her. Mary is his future.

John looks at Sherlock, and sees a ghost.

\----

 

Because Sherlock is weak when it comes to John, because he’s furious with himself for botching it all, and hates every _last thing in the world_ right now, Sherlock breaks his most strict rule. He touches himself and imagines his fingers are John’s. It’s easy to do, Sherlock has stowed away the exact shape and feel of John’s hands in minute detail, down to the gun calluses on his right hand. He’s often found his body under John’s hands, but then it was only for patching injuries or steady fingertips pressing against Sherlock’s pulse. 

He’d made the mistake two times before. Once right after the pool incident when their proximity had been unbearable, Sherlock was confused and angry with it. He’d done it in the shower, with John’s conditioning creme covering his fingers, around his cock, with the hastily memorised feeling of John’s body carrying him against the door.

Sherlock knew then what a slippery slope it was, and the inferior touch of Sherlock’s hand could only ultimately disappoint. 

The second time Sherlock was still dead to the world. He was between missions, stuck in a safe house in Llangrannog on the Welsh Coast. Sherlock had climbed a cliff , sat atop it and looked idly out at the sea. The wind had roared cold and hollow in his ears, and he longed for home, the smell of John’s hair on a crisp autumn day. He closed his eyes and could hear John singing softly while folding clothes.

Sherlock wanted it too much, was feeling too sorry for himself, so he excused himself from guilt and lost himself in fantasy.

Now it’s worse than ever, Sherlock buries his nose in an old jumper John left behind, the blue striped one he only wore around the flat. Sherlock loved seeing him in the jumper, it meant John planned on staying in that day. Even when Sherlock wasn’t going stir-crazy, he pretended he was anyways because then John would come up with all sorts of ways of occupying Sherlock’s mental rabidity. Board games, consistent failures at baking which should have been a disappointment, but seeing John covered in flour and fuming over brickish butterscotch shortbread made Sherlock feel a hot burst of affection in his chest. He became addicted to that feeling before he even had a chance to force it down. 

His whole body is trembling, shaking from wanting, the way it’s prone to do when Sherlock is on the verge of coming. He doesn’t even have the energy to keep himself from imagining John’s lips on the spot behind his ear, God, what would it feel like to be kissed and kissed and kissed by him. Sherlock forgets about self-imposed rules, he chokes John’s name out in the darkness.

\----

Baker Street feels like a broken music box, full of nostalgia, but the song has gone from the heart of it. He still smells like woodsmoke, the acrid stink of burnt hair clings from going headfirst into a bonfire.

Seeing John there, stuffed under the flames like tinder, Sherlock had never been more terrified in his life. 

He goes upstairs and lies in John’s bed, stares at the bones of the thing John used to call his home. He feels empty. No craving, nor trepidation, just the heavy sense of vacancy that once lied to Sherlock and sold itself as comfort. He knows it now for the monster that it is, knows its shackles and its loneliness; its socketed mouth where no light can escape.

 

\---

 

He tricks John into forgiving him. He does it in the most tasteless and inappropriate way possible, but John is hardly surprised because it’s Sherlock doing a Sherlock thing.

Sherlock knows that the forgiveness is a lie. Sherlock has touched grief before, when Redbeard died. Mum and Dad had brought him home a dog on Sherlock’s sixth birthday, and he’d loved the creature dearly. For years Redbeard faithfully slept at the end of Sherlock’s bed, followed him wherever he was allowed, listened to all of Sherlock’s ramblings like he even understood a fourth of it. Once a man with tar stained teeth and a red tie tried to lure Sherlock away from the park benches. Mum had only turned her back for one second to retrieve a book from the car.

As soon as the man knelt down to Sherlock with a wolfish sneer, Redbeard ran next to them, barking fiercely. His lips pulled up over canine teeth, jaws snapping and saliva flying about at the man until he had grown too frightened and ran far away. When Redbeard died Sherlock was only just turned nine, and it was devastating. His first real brush with the inescapable fact that life ends, and this thing you have loved will never come back to you.

John lived under this reality for two years, and grief, real grief, never completely leaves you. It forms a sort of scar in your mind, and never quite mends itself properly. Grief is every emotion all at once, asking for more room where none is left.

So no, Sherlock can’t truly be forgiven, but John does it anyways.

 

\----

 

Sherlock stands next to Mary as John is fitted for his groom’s suit. The tailor is pinching at John’s sides, solemnly rolling the trouser legs from under John’s socked feet.

They’ve retreated into a far corner since the man kept muttering curses in Romanian and sending dark glances in his and Mary’s direction.

“He says we’re crowding him,” Mary smiles. 

Sherlock glances over to her, always surprised when he learns some other new thing about Mary. “Really?”

“Well, technically he said ‘fuck off,’ but I got the jist.” 

Sherlock looks back over at John, he’s shifting his shoulders, looking slightly uncomfortable. The champagne colour of the waistcoat suits him well enough, although Sherlock would have gone for something with a bit more colour. Buttery yellow to bring out the cobalt of John’s eyes. Something stained like ripe berries for the summer tone of his skin.

Either way, Sherlock will still look pale and washed over like painted ice.

Instead he asks, “Where did you learn to speak Romanian?”

“I think he looks very fit in that suit, don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says on sigh, eyes glued to sight of braces conforming to the planes of John’s back, then realises. He takes a deep breath, begins gesturing absently in the opposite direction, prepared to make a random comment on the condition of the rented tuxedos and just exactly what happened in them prior to being returned.

Mary hooks her arms through his, giggles like the whole spectacle of Sherlock’s floundering is personally entertaining. He looks down to her, and she grins knowingly and pats his forearm. “Oh come on, Sherlock. It’s perfectly fine to look.” 

Sherlock jerks his gaze toward her, frowns when she winks at him, and Sherlock grits his teeth against the jealousy that rises quick and hot in his throat.

“People pass him all day long and only see an average man. He’s much more than that though. I can see why you picked him.” 

John looks over to them, rolls his eyes when he catches them staring. The tailor shouts at him, holds up a pin and gestures emphatically at puckered seams.

Sherlock never picked John, never ever thought of it as something he controlled. If anyone “picked” anyone, it was John who came and followed and stayed.

“He would have gone with you to grave, you know. Might still do. Sometimes I think your name should be on that wedding invitation instead of mine!” She shushes Sherlock’s protest, reaches up and lightly pinches his cheek. She’s done it before, and it seemed then a friendly gesture of affection. Now it vaguely feels admonishing.

“I guess you just aren’t the relationship type, are you. You’d grow bored with all the little things. Things that you once thought were sweet, would turn so irksome. Piss on the seat and dirty socks stuffed between sofa cushions. The life of a domesticated male, scary that.”

Sherlock doesn’t remind her that he and John lived together for well over a year and with the passing of time had only grown to love John’s idiosyncrasies. Singing while cooking, micromanaging tupperware storage, his insistence on baths. Just baths. He’d sit in there with the tub for over an hour leaving Sherlock insanely bored, and when he finally vacated the loo it always smelled stupidly of eucalyptus and spearmint for the rest of the night, or orange and ginger, and on particularly shite days there was always lavender and vanilla.

John was just as interesting and fantastic and not at all dull on that first day, as he is now. Sherlock doesn’t need a wedding band and a piece of paper to know he could spend days alone watching John sit quietly, and be content with only that.

\----

 

Sherlock never saw the appeal in a stag do. Pubs, people, imbibing and behaving foolishly. He’s wary of substances that both lower your inhibitions and impair your comprehension. Last time he’d been wasted was five Christmases ago, a bottle of 2003 Malbec at his cousin’s home in Dorchester. Sherlock had been a troublesome child, but nothing in comparison to cousin Margaret’s offspring which defied the laws of gravity by bouncing from chairs and walls and Grandmere’s china cabinet, and seemed to be stuck at one screeching speaking volume. 

He drunk dialed Mycroft’s personal assistant and had a conversation he still cannot recall, and much to Mummy’s eternal chagrin, passed out in the flower garden to escape the negative sensory overload.

He and John are bored with it. Sherlock hasn’t the faintest idea as to why John agreed to any of this, and how, of all people in existence, Sherlock is the one leading the pub crawl. Literally any other person in the whole of the United Kingdom would have been more qualified. It’s just the two of them, all of John’s other friends either hate Sherlock, hate John, are working, or dead.

It feels awkward.

John despises crowds, says he doesn’t like the feel of being surrounded and having a stranger breathing down his neck. Sherlock is a bomb of deduction and is forthright expressing his antipathy of the vast cluster of humankind. While Sherlock is able to come across charming on the occasion, he’d simply rather not because it’s too much work and Sherlock is terribly lazy.

Mary must have thought it some sort of joke, sending two of the most socially awkward men in London out for club romp. But John had agreed. Smiled at Sherlock and said he looked forward to it.

 

Unfortunately, John does not look happy at all right now. Sherlock didn’t know beforehand that this was a gay club, and now with a rainbow flag sticking out of some mixed bevvy, and a plethora of shirtless men, he’s beginning to suspect.

“I don’t understand,” Sherlock yells out to John, his voice barely audible underneath the blaring of electronic music, “Why’ve they taken their shirts off? Are we expected to take ours off too?” He hadn’t considered it before. Could be interesting, it’s getting a bit hot.

Alarmed John looks down at Sherlock’s chest, like he’s expecting the shirt to have suddenly jumped from Sherlock’s skin and sailed off overhead.

“Keep your clothes on! They’ll be arse over tits as it is.”

Sherlock doesn’t ask what he means by that. He is well on his way past a pleasant buzz, and he isn’t sure how it happened, but he feels nice. John’s eyes dart around to the bar, to the dancefloor, to Sherlock, again and again and again in a circuit.

A few men stare openly in their direction, and one downs the last dredges in his pint and begins walking over. A muscle in John’s jaw twitches. He slips into the seat next to Sherlock, lop-sided smile, roughly same age as John, older than Sherlock by four to five years. By his physical condition, the circumference of his neck, Sherlock estimates the man is either a personal trainer, or possibly a bin man, or a cattle driver. Sherlock really isn’t in the best state of attention right now, and actually the man looks like a potato precariously stuffed into a sausage casing.

“Fancy a top off?”

“I’m keeping on my shirt,” Sherlock looks pointedly at John. “I have to, because it’s mine.” John was very firm about staying dressed.

The idiot chuckles, leans in closer to Sherlock’s ear. “I mean, I’m going to buy you a drink. We can talk about sorting your clothes after.”

Sherlock chokes on his drink, he sputters and giggles at the proposition. “Terrible, just awful execution of a chat up.”

He seems unphased by Sherlock’s disinterest and reaches to set his hand on Sherlock’s forearm. 

“Mate, we were talking,” John slides his elbows onto the table, trying to take up more space than his body allows. 

Sherlock’s admirer rolls his eyes, and says over his shoulder, “Didn’t look it. Actually, seemed to me a bloke out of his league.”

John grins, not the happy or sarcastic grin, but the one he puts on right before his temper pops. Sherlock is conscious that he should make clear that he has absolutely no intention of letting this imbecile anywhere near his shirt, but it’s so lovely watching John become defensive, overprotective. 

“Right, because look at you. Who doesn’t want to get off with a middle aged man with a steroid habit? Those purplish skin eruptions across your shoulders, receding hairline, and I’d wager some testicular shrinkage.”

Sherlock watches the man’s face go beet red. 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” John rises out of his seat, takes a white card from his billfold and slides it across the table toward the man’s clenched fist. “Come by my clinic when the erectile dysfunctions turns up. I’ll get you sorted out.” John pulls Sherlock away from the table by his collar. “Pip pip!” John calls over his shoulder, and under his breath, “Wanker.”

 

\----

 

They’re both clumsy and drunk. John abandoned his shoes, and their ankles are nearly crossing. John is grinning at Sherlock, open and affectionate about it, and Sherlock cracks terrible jokes just to hear him laugh.

He’s missed the ease of them, the effortless way they occupy one another space. Boundaries that he and John skirted before, are now avoided altogether with Mary’s presence. 

It feels good when John looks at him like Sherlock is something wonderful.

John slips from his seat, his hand wraps around the vulnerable jut of Sherlock’s knee for just a moment. Another hand remains fisted between Sherlock’s thighs.

“I don’t mind,” he says. It sounds like an offer. Maybe it is.

It would be easy, one gentle tug and then John in his lap, their fingers tangling between buttons and zips. Frantic kisses, completely inelegant and fantastic. 

Hesitance and inexperience, John’s impending marriage, it turns the wanting sour. God, but the _wanting._

It’s going to take Sherlock for all he’s worth.

\---

 

Baker Street is too quiet, even the walls stand frustratingly straight and apologetic.

Sherlock threw the wedding suit off in the bathroom, stepped over it, and he isn’t going to look at it again. He won’t touch it. Hopefully Mrs. Hudson will see it and dispose of it in a shady skip somewhere.

His fingers feel raw, they throb angrily from the way he depresses the violin’s strings too hard. Sherlock wills the instrument into song, forces himself to listen to the way every note calls out bitter and concise. 

John and Mary Watson, a child on the way, and Sherlock fading into a bedtime story because that’s what men like him become. It seems impossible that something intangible has so much substance. What do people do with all their bits of unwanted love? Sherlock is simultaneously trapped and liberated by its magnitude. He could no more cast off an arm or a leg. 

“How do people live with it?” Love, he means. Sherlock pauses, bow in hand. Hears the soft rustle of Mycroft’s bespoke suit as he pours two fingers worth of scotch into tumblers for them both. 

Without asking what ‘it’ is, because Mycroft never needs to ask, he says simply, “If I knew, I would tell you, baby brother.”

“And are you satisfied this way? Us, the way we are.” Alone. Sherlock sets the violin in its cradle, looks toward Mycroft. His brother only smiles, closed-mouthed, which seems enough of an answer.

“You can say ‘I told you so.’ Although to be fair I didn’t quite understand until I was in the middle of the world’s most dubiously platonic best man’s toast. Christ.” Embarrassed, Sherlock swirls the scotch, looks into the slosh of amber. “I shouldn't have gotten involved. Why do I keep doing that? Stupid.” 

Victor, John, even Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade to varying degrees. It’s already been proven that keeping them also means endangering their lives on occasion, hurting them. They slow him with their insistence, their averageness. 

“Listen to me now,” Mycroft leans forward, elbows on his knees and fingers steepled under his chin. “I’m about to give you the best piece of advice you’re ever going to receive, and you must listen and promise to do exactly as I say. Hear me as your brother, and not your mentor.”

“You’re not my men--” Sherlock begins to protests, but Mycroft silences him with a single raised brow.

Put in place, Sherlock’s eyes flick about the room before resettling on Mycroft’s still form. “Fine,” he eventually replies

He takes his time, enunciates each word deliberately, and looks into Sherlock’s eyes.

“Don’t be like me,” Mycroft lifts his chin, sits back into John’s chair. He drinks the scotch in one swallow. “Now, what do you say if we move this dreadful chair to another room. You’ve been staring at the ragged stitching on the left arm where John fidgets with the seams for the past five minutes. The depth of your affection is making me nauseous.”  
\----

 

Sherlock is nearly thirty-five when he kisses Janine.

It seems even excessively unfair to her, being that he’s using her as glorified doorway. Also she smells like exoctic amber and moroccan fig, instead of gunmetal and clean cotton. It’s making things difficult to stay in character. She sat there next to him, staring at his mouth, expectant, and in needing to make this a believable relationship he leans over and tries to be quick, but believable.

Now, there are breasts pressing against his chest, and he doesn’t even know where to start with those. Women have utterly amazing bodies, from a physiological standpoint, and Sherlock is intimidated by the sheer functionality of them. They bleed, grow entire humans, sync elementally with tides, produce and endure things Sherlock has no hope of ever experiencing.

Scientifically they’re fascinating, sexually Sherlock would have as much enjoyment groping a bag of sand. She’s flicking her tongue against his lip, soft and blatantly enticing from an unbiased standpoint. 

Sherlock finds bias, though. Still prefers the straightforward familiarity of men and their unforgiving lines pressed against him. He thinks of John’s teeth edged against his pulse like a wild animal.

Yeah, this isn’t going to work.

Sherlock leaps up, sends Janine tumbling sideways onto the sofa. “Crime scene! Lestrade calling!”

Janine smooths her shirt down, “What, really? I didn’t hear your mobile at all.”

“No? How odd.” Sherlock snatches his coat from the hook, kisses Janine’s cheek. Pretends to scroll through texts. “Crime in progress, though. I’ll call you later, um, darling..?”

 

He hides in Mrs. Hudson’s washroom. They share a cigarette and an overly large slice of banoffee pie while Mrs. Hudson prattles on about how lovely Janine is, how perfect is her skin tone, and isn’t Sherlock just so happy to have a girlfriend?

Eventually the conversation weighs him down. 

“Mrs. Hudson, you do realise that I am gay.” The world doesn’t implode the way he suspected it might if he ever managed to say it plainly in front of another person. He doesn’t even remember how or why something so intrinsic became something he felt so compelled to keep secreted away in his heart.

Mrs. Hudson doesn’t miss a beat, only blows cigarette smoke through the cracked window and wipes a crumb from her chin. “Oh love,” she pats his hand. “Of course I do. Could you give me a hand with the furnace later? Dodgy wires.”

\---

He’s dying. Mary killed him, and all these doors, the cold room with Mycroft staring down at Sherlock’s body, words from people he has trusted telling him how to stay alive; these are just the illusions of a dying mind. He searches for the room he’d built for John, thinks the memory of a perpetual Sunday morning with John sleep mussed and staring open and lazily at Sherlock from across a room.

Mary’s there waiting, she shoots him in the heart again. Even in his head she’s still hurting him.

He’s in a cell with a madman, James Moriarty isn’t really James Moriarty, it’s that piece of Sherlock he’s locked so far away. Here is the place of Sherlock’s undoing. Fear, love, pain, desire, it beats like a drum in this room. He wants it to stop now, Sherlock feels how simple it would be to just _let go_. Somewhere very far away from here, Sherlock’s body is dying on a table. In a moment all of his knowledge, all the things that made him special and brilliant, every misspent moment, unmet potential, longed for kisses, all of this will end. 

Then John’s name is in his ear, and Sherlock finds himself clinging to the last spark of heat in his chest. Everything dissolves into corridors and dark corners, the staircase where he first pressed his back against the wall and watched John laugh breathlessly, the black damask wallpaper, the yellow smiling face. 

\---

John wordlessly drags a box full of clothes up the stairs. When Sherlock goes to brush his teeth, John’s shaving kit and plain castile soap are sitting on top of the basin. Sherlock slips the soap in the dish, listens to John pace above him like a trapped animal.

\---

 

“Stop, let me do that.”

Sherlock pauses mid-unbuttoning, John leans against one of the kitchen walls arms folded, stares at the gauze and sterile scissors set on top of the table.

“It’s fine,” Sherlock says lowly, continues to separate shirt buttons from their slots, winces when he shrugs down the shirt over his shoulders. Stitches pull uncomfortably, unhealed tissues setting off pain receptors, but he’d rather struggle with it than have John fussed out of pity or a sense of obligation.

John predictably ignores Sherlock’s competence, less predictably and unecesarily pushes the rest of the shirt from his shoulders. He puts his hand lightly over the old gauze, licks his lips. Gooseflesh begins spreading over the tops of Sherlock’s arms, John watches that too before looking up into Sherlock’s eyes. 

“She put a hole in you.”

And because this is true in so many ways Sherlock only meets that gaze whispers, “Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” John clenches his jaw, and shakes his head. He stares at his hand, perplexed as if the whole thing doesn’t belong to the rest of his body. “You did die. Again. You have to stop doing that.”

“Not your fault,” his eyes shut helplessly before Sherlock casts his sight toward the ceiling , head falling back to rest against the cabinetry when John spreads his fingers to hide the bandage because Sherlock can tell that it pains him to see it. A thumb strokes bare skin.

“I can’t tell what’s a lie anymore,” John looks at Sherlock, looks and looks and doesn’t say any more.

 

\---

They don’t talk about the Mary situation for some time. At first it’s almost nice, pretending she doesn’t exist, letting John draw closer and closer into Sherlock’s space without contemplating whether or not it’s appropriate. The tension is nearly unbearable, perhaps this is why John was distancing himself prior to the events that led him back into the sanctuary of Baker street.

Whenever John takes Sherlock by the hip to move him from cleaning an experimental byproduct, his fingertips dig too hard into the hollow of his ilium. His body touches the line of Sherlock’s back. “Stop overexerting, I’m not trained in heart surgery if you decide to blow a gasket.” 

John wants something from him, Sherlock can tell by the quick little exhales of air John lets loose when Sherlock goes pliant in John’s hand and allows himself to be turned until the backs of his thighs hit the lip of the table.

Whether it’s comfort, reaffirmation, distraction, or the need to feel anything at all, that John seems to want badly from Sherlock, it mustn't be that debilitating. John always takes his hands away, looks at Sherlock like a guilty secret.

\---

“We have to talk about Mary. You’ve had enough time to wallow in betrayal, we need to figure out what’s next. Magnussen doesn’t care about your broken home.”

“Let him have her,” John stares into the fire, drains his glass of scotch.

Sherlock sighs, rolls his eyes, “She’s carrying your child.” At least he still operating under the idea, but a liar is a liar. They do so indiscriminately to achieve their own means. Sherlock should know a liar when he sees one, he knows his own kind.

John slams the glass down on the tray. 

Sherlock blinks, stands and looks about the room. “I’m trying to help.” After all, he’s not being completely unselfish. He’s been around the paths of enough assassins to know that their past always catches up with them in some way or another. The collateral damage is usually tragic, and the blameless suffer to punish the guilty. Revenge is taken in the form of dead children, friends, family,and Sherlock would rather die himself than watch that happen.

“Then help her yourself,” John says too loudly, “You seem keen enough to take one bullet for her, what’s another!”

Stunned, Sherlock flinches away. Watches John drop his head into hands where they were dangling between his thighs. He scrubs over his face, clutches the hair over his ears. “I’m sorry,” John says softly, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean it.”

\---

Mary calls his phone constantly for nearly a month straight. Every trill of the tone, the dull sound of it vibrating on top of the sofa cushions, it induces a sort of angry anxiety in Sherlock. He hates the noise, his fingers itch to send the thing through a rubbish compactor. Mary is this ever-present slur over their lives, and whether or not her name is in their mouth’s, she’s still there devouring what once was comfort. She frightens Sherlock, and he’ll never admit it at all.

John gets a new mobile. 

\---

“Sherlock, someone’s at the door,” John calls out from the kitchen. “Your brother, I think. Texted a few hours ago, said he was coming by to check on you. So I assume he needs something.”

Sherlock ignores the knocking, can’t be fussed out of his current state of _taedium vitae_. He’s well enough to do everything on his own, but Lestrade refuses to take him at a crime scene since John declared Sherlock’s outwardly stable condition too precarious to risk quite yet. Self-referred clients are currently scarce what with the tabloid declarations of Sherlock’s insatiable, borderline nefarious, sexual appetite, and descent back into addiction. Media loves a trainwreck.

A thirty something year old consulting detective, with indelicate designs toward men who dress a bit like his Dad, and hasn’t had partnered sex in well over fifteen years? And uses drugs to fill up the silence and chase away hollowness? Not exactly a Pulitzer. 

“Look, are you going to get that? I’m up to my elbows in sink water.” John sloshes about. “Fine, lazy arse.”

He wipes the dampness of his hands onto his jumper before opening the door. “Morning, Myc--” John pauses, laughs awkwardly, “Oh, hello. Pardon, I was just.. Expecting someone else? Can I help you?”

“Yes,” Sherlock recognises the voice instantly, “Sorry, no. I just needed to..” Sherlock sits up, scrubs at wayward curls in a panic, walks toward the door. “I’m a friend of--” Victor Trevor looks over John’s shoulder, stares silent and wide-eyed at Sherlock. 

“Hello,” Victor huffs a sort of amazed laugh, smiles.

“Hello,” Sherlock mirrors, looking him up and down, mind whirling to compare this Victor here to the one Sherlock knew so many years ago. He’s let his hair grow out a bit, curly and black much like Sherlock’s, except the first peak of silver dots the temples. Spectacles cover most of the fine lines beginning to distinguish the space between his brows.

He’s still lovely, all of that youth replaced with the confidence of someone with a life well lived, and well loved. The gold around his ring finger glints.

“I sent flowers to your mum when you died,” Victor says softly, still searching Sherlock’s face. “I was working in Marrakesh, I didn’t hear of it until after the funeral. Sorry I missed… it.” He shakes his head, “God, not like that, but.. Then the shooting. I thought… I don’t know.”

“I know,” he’d seen the flowers in the corner of his parent’s parlor before he’d left the country. “Marigolds, no sender name, no note, I thought as much.”

“You look well,” Victors nods toward him.

“Right, decent for someone who does half time as a corpse, I suppose.” 

“Yeah, exactly. I wasn’t going to say it, but.” They grin at each other. 

John clears his throat, still standing between them both, fingers wrapped around the door’s handle. Before Sherlock has the chance to jump into an introduction, Victor extends his hand, shakes John’s.

“Sorry, I’m Trevor, Victor Trevor. Sherlock and I were--” he looks quickly to Sherlock, then back toward John, “We went to uni together. You must be Mr. Watson. I’ve read your blog, quite the Boswell you are. Hilarious, too.”

“Would you like to come in, can we get you a drink? Glass of water?” 

Victor steps inside, clutches his coat against his stomach. “Thank you, but I can’t. I have to be in Surrey by noon.” He addresses Sherlock now, “Dad passed a few years ago, I’m bringing my Mum back to Wisconsin. Won’t have much reason to come back this way.”

Sherlock pulls a sour face, “Wisconsin? Seriously?”

“We can’t all of us live in the big city. I can’t even see the stars in London. Besides, work is there. Everything is there, now.”

“Of course,” Sherlock nods, looks pointedly toward John.

“So I’ll just,” John speaks, overloud about it, narrows his eyes at Victor in a way that Sherlock doesn’t miss. “I need to run out to the chemist anyway.” John continues to stand there and not leave, fingers ticking away by his sides. The worst poker tell ever, Sherlock imagines. How could this man ever have managed to gamble? 

Usually Sherlock takes great delight in John’s sense of territoriality, but this is Victor and he doesn’t want him caught on the other end of John’s misplaced jealousy. 

 

When John has left (closing the door two times harder than usual, gait tense, currently questioning Mrs. Hudson downstairs as the primary entrance hasn’t been opened yet) Victor and Sherlock sit across from each other. Sherlock chooses to take John’s chair, lending Victor his own black leather one. They watch each other closely. Awkward attempts at casual commentary are made, which Sherlock always finds tedious but is enduring it because he can’t imagine what’s on the other side of London weather and current political events of which he is utterly out of his depth. He has Mycroft for any geopolitical needs.

“Why did you come here? Why now, after so many years?” He doesn’t mean for it to come out as accusatory as it sounds, he only wants to understand. “It’s not for a case, I know when someone needs my help there. You don’t appear to be dying, or a spouse turned rogue assassin.”

“What--”

“And since you’re married, happily at that, I assume it’s not an attempt at rekindling the flame. Who is he, by the way?” Sherlock examines the bow tie strung through Victor’s collar. Navy blue, and upon further scrutiny, the polka dots are actually tiny smiling suns. The sort of gift only the truly tasteless would inflict on someone. “And where did you get _children_ from?”

“From a Super Walmart just off the motoway,” Victor cheeks, and Sherlock raises his eyebrows in sudden alarm. “Numpty, where do you think I got a child from? We adopted four years ago. Her name’s Dalia. And my husband is Cameron.”

“Congratulations,” Sherlock says, because he isn’t at all sure what the protocol on this matter would entail. 

“Thank you.”

There’s another space of uncomfortable silence, Sherlock drums his fingers against the armrest of John’s chair.

“I wanted to apologise. I don’t have the right, but.. Ever since the moment I stepped foot on that plane.” Victor starts quietly, “I left because I thought it was the only way to save you. I nearly came back a hundred times.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Victor averts his eyes, “I was afraid. Afraid you were angry with me, afraid I’d come home to you and nothing would change, that I’d see you and get confused over what was right and wrong. That I’d make things worse. All sorts of stuff.”

“And do you?” Sherlock asks, “Think you did the right thing.”

Victor shrugs, sighs and uses a thumb to adjust his spectacles. 

“You don’t need to apologize,” Sherlock narrows his eyes in befuddlement. “I remember my state at the time, I doubt there are many out there who’d do much different.” A brief, pained expression, crosses Victor’s eyes. Sherlock adds quietly, “I think no less of you for it. Sometimes all there’s left is choices we hate.” He knows this terribly, and completely.

“When you killed yourself--”

“Fake killed myself,” Sherlock interjects.

“I regretted it. I regretted all the years I let pass in silence, and thought maybe you died with it in the back of your head that I never cared at all. Even though we hadn’t spoken in years, I know for certain the world is better with you in it.”

Sherlock sits silently, brow pulled down, even his fingers have become stilled.

“I just wanted you to know that. You’re special, you always will be to me. And I _am_ glad you’re not dead.” Victor sighs like a burden has been removed from off his shoulders, begins to rise from the chair and makes a move to leave. Sherlock reaches out and grabs his hand as Victor passes by, struck with the sudden and desperate need to be a part of this conversation other than its object. Victor looks down, eyes not surprised or alarmed, only concerned in the way Sherlock remembers so well.

“Me too,” Sherlock says nonsensically, corrects himself, “That is to say, I’m sorry too.” He looks at the frayed rug and shakes his head in dismay. “I don’t know why I keep doing that.”

Victor comes back to sit in his chair, doesn’t drop Sherlock’s hand. “Doing what?” He tips Sherlock’s chin up to look to see his eyes. “Sherlock, doing what?”

“Making it so hard.” The back of his throat feels choked, sort of like panicking and crying and it just doesn’t make it to his eyes. “I make a mess of it all.” 

Victor places both hands on Sherlock’s shoulders, looks him right in the eyes, “Listen to me,” he demands firmly. “Stop. Being. An idiot.” Before Sherlock can become insulted he continues, places his hands now softly against Sherlock’s cheeks. “It wasn’t hard-- No, shut up--the problem was never not being able to love you hard enough. _Never._ Don’t ever talk about yourself like that, do you hear me? You’re mad, but I don’t for a second believe there’s nothing left of the man I knew that was also hilarious and passionate. Tell me there aren’t dozens of people out there that owe you their lives.”

“I don’t think--” 

Victor smiles, lets go of Sherlock. “You were worth every bit of it. My regrets weren’t _you_ , only that I failed you.” He looks toward the door. “I think someone else must feel that way sometimes.”

Sherlock doesn’t have to hear a name to know he means John. Victor gets up from his chair again, pulls on the hem of his jumper. “Ammi will be waiting for me, she gets tetchy when I’m late.”

“I’ll see you out,” Sherlock helps Victor with his coat and walks with him.

“Are you happy?” he blurts out as Victor cracks open the door. “It’s none of business of course. But you are, though. Right?” 

Victor smiles, small contented thing. “I am. I’m very happy.”

Sherlock eyes shutter close in relief, and then before he talks himself out of it, “I did, you know. I felt.. the same.”

Victor eyes gloss over wet. “I know.”

“I should have said it to you then. Bit after the point now, suppose.”

“Yeah,” Victor laughs hoarsely, “Better late than never, right? And Sherlock..”

“Yes?”

Victor wraps his arms over Sherlock’s shoulders, pulls him in tight and hugs him. At first Sherlock’s arms stiffen and his body reacts like it’s been caught. He doesn’t do this often, the touching, despite his tactile and demonstrative nature. People stopped trying to embrace him a long time ago, and now such occasions are strictly relegated to family, overly-thankful clients, and the one time Lestrade ambushed him with a surprise bear hug. Eventually he allows it, hugs back, the body pressed close familiar and completely different. It looks and sounds like Victor, but the muscles of his back are no longer boyish. He smells like someone else’s Victor, and a part of Sherlock aches to recognise this. It isn’t out of jealousy, but Sherlock imagines anyone would feel a bit heartsick to become strangers with someone they once knew so well.

Victor squeezes him one last time, whispers in Sherlock’s ear. “Don’t make the same mistake twice.”

\----

 

He makes the same mistake, but in a much grander failure. 

Months go by in small touches and heated glances, John goes as far to slide his fingers into the hair the nape of Sherlock’s neck one night while watching trash telly together. He would have allowed Sherlock to turn his head and guided their mouths together. Sherlock panicked, mind immediately jumping to their lack of time with Magnussen on their scent, Mary’s own unpredictability, John’s marriage, John’s baby, and Sherlock sees too many sad, dead ends.

He bolts.

The next day John is quieter, defeated almost. By the end of the week he texts Mary. A simple _Baby all right?_ By the end of the month, John agrees to reunite with her at Christmas.

It’s a truly bollocked Christmas. John on the verge of leaving again, Mummy overcooked the ham, and Sherlock murdered a man.

As much as Sherlock tells himself Magnussen needed to be removed from the face of the earth, and Sherlock fears John would have been the unintentional victim of Mary’s past crimes, it’s another thing to have held the gun in his hand and see a man die by it.

He’s stuck in a holding room at MI5, the door is guarded, even though Sherlock promised not to run. He’ll go. He will, without a word. There’s not much left here. He’ll most certainly die in Eastern Europe, but hopefully he’ll be too busy to notice the actual experience this time.

_”I have permission to be here, get out of my way!”_

Sherlock smiles, can hear the guard trying to persuade John to calm down, which only makes it that much worse. After a bit of shouting and a call to Mycroft, John bursts into the room, slams the door, marches over to Sherlock.

“Why did you do that! God, Sherlock, did you even think--”

“Yes.”

“Of what would happen if you--”

“Yes.”

John is very angry now, clenches his fists and speaks softly, “Stop interrupting me, just fucking stop, right. Why did you do that? It wasn’t _your_ job. Why would you do that for her?”

Now it’s Sherlock’s turn to go furious, to have his lips twist in disgust because John can be so _stupid_. “For her? For _her_?” He shakes his head, “No. Not for Mary. For _you.”_

“Me,” John says, and god he really is slow. He blinks up at Sherlock with big eyes, blue and limpid and Sherlock wants to kiss him blind.

“Every time I die it seems to be for you.” Sherlock has had it wrong this whole time, he isn’t killing himself, John is the one with the gun in his hand and taking up all the space and he’s the one killing Sherlock by standing there and breathing.

“I never _asked_ you to! I never wanted that! I only wanted you! You died when you jumped off that roof, to me you did, and I died too. Not with blood on my face or surrounded by strangers, but slower and every night some part of me just-- stopped. What were you thinking!”

“That you’d get to go off and be happy! Can’t you understand? I’ve stood back and watched you leave and I asked for nothing, nothing at all. Even though I hated doing it, even though it _hurt_ me. This hurts me,” Sherlock cups John’s face between his hands, tries to ignore the childish urge to cry, “This hurts me.”

Someone knocks on the door, says, “Times up,” blandly

John closes his eyes when Sherlock takes his hands and clenches them back down by his sides. “They’re not really going to send you away, are they? After everything you’ve done.”

“Precisely for what I’ve done.”

Knock knock knock. Time’s up. Knock knock knock. Time’s up. The guard opens the door, opens his mouth to say it again. John snatches the obsidian paper weight from the desk behind Sherlock’s thighs, and sends it flying at the guard. It misses his head by a good couple feet but the point of the gesture lands true.

“Fuck off, mate!” John shouts, and the guard obediently fucks off.

John stands there and doesn’t reach for him, and doesn’t leave.

 

When Sherlock says good-bye for what he thinks is the last time, he nearly lets his tongue slip to say the thing he’s silently told John for years. Over coffee, during cases, during the middle of board games, in the dimness of his bedroom, in that dingy hostel in Bucharest. Sherlock has whispered it hundreds of time, confessed himself in the safety of darkness and solitude.

Instead he makes John laugh, makes a flimsy joke, and maybe it’s better this way. Safer.

He knows the mistake instantly, but the moment is gone.

Sherlock doesn’t expect any more chances. It’s going to choke him for the rest of what will be his short life, and at least there’s that. He won’t have to live very long with his regret.

But then, because the universe is hilarious; the jet turns back around.

John is a speck on the ground, still waiting.

\----

John doesn’t leave Sherlock alone with Mary, and Mary doesn’t leave John alone with Sherlock. They think he doesn’t notice, but of course that’s ridiculous. He sees the side glances Mary directs at him when John isn’t aware. Sherlock sees John’s posture around Mary, far too awkward and anticipatory. They both know something here as gone a bit off, but neither are mentioning it, so Sherlock won’t either.

John begins staying later, and Mary doesn’t come at all. Before she shot Sherlock, before she and John married and left off to golf and swim and fuck on a beach in Madrid (John hates golf, and only likes the sea when it’s gotten cold and reflecting the grey of clouds) they would text throughout the day. Mary would drag Sherlock out for a coffee or gyros during her lunch breaks that never matched with John’s. 

They would only really talk about John the entire time, since neither Sherlock or Mary were keen to talk about their own histories for all the now obvious reasons. 

John changes the subject when Sherlock attempts to do the polite thing and ask after his nearing six-month pregnant wife. He drums his fingertips against the sides of his thighs and twists his chin to sharply toward Sherlock, smiles thin-lipped and says, “She’s great, just great,” when his entire body whispers _I don’t want to talk about it._

Then a full two weeks go by without a word, not so much as a text from either of the Watson’s. Sherlock, on the other hand texts John far more than necessary because he’s worried John might be dead in a soggy ravine on the outskirts of some secluded village somewhere. Strung up in an abandoned factory, kidnapped and starving to death in an old desert bomb shelter by someone keen to take out revenge on Mary for assassinating their boss/brother/child/family/friend, the list goes on.

Surely Sherlock would feel it if John was dead. The world isn’t so small and so useless that he wouldn’t feel the light being wrenched from it. 

It isn’t until Sherlock dresses in jeans and a cap to cover his hair and begins snooping about John’s bins that the panic really settles into something serious. He opens the flimsy bag right there on the street, neighbours passing with baby carriages and small dogs and whispering while Sherlock sits cross legged on the cement sorting through rubbish.

No food, save one foil wrapper from an Apple Blast toaster pastry that John favours, damp tea bags. The rest is shredded papers, some completely innocent advertisement postage, but these bits are interspersed with other documents featuring names Sherlock has never seen before, he pieces half a page together written in Cyrillic script. He can read the Cyrillic, but even it is encoded into a Bifid cipher and without a key Sherlock has little to no hope of translating. 

He finds the torn pictures, is only able to re-piece one. Sherlock presses together the jagged lines showing a younger Mary with brown hair pulled back into a plait. She’s laughing, one hand clutching a rifle, the other with the middle finger raised. He has no idea why she would keep it. Sentiment perhaps. She looks happy.

Finally he sees the bit of formal parchment with John’s name, Mary’s name, the foil seal granting their legal matrimony. Sherlock hastily re-stuffs the bin bag, and makes his way toward the windows of their flat, curtains are drawn and he can’t see in. No voices or footsteps from within. Sherlock makes quick work of the lock and steps inside.

Empty. Empty. Everything is gone from kettle to teacup. The floors have been swept and all the cupboards are bare. No one lives here anymore. The space smells of bleaching liquid.

Within 76 seconds Sherlock has Mycroft on the phone, and no matter how many times Sherlock promises to personally descend upon his office with all the dignity of a hellstorm, Mycroft refuses to help.

“He isn’t off being dead somewhere, I can tell you that.” Mycroft makes an exasperated sound, tells Sherlock to hold and shouts something in Korean to some poor apologetic soul. A door shuts and Mycroft speaks to him again. “Look around you and make a deduction. Do you honestly think I would not have intervened if something serious were afoot.”

“All of his clothes are gone, his marriage license is in the rubbish. You think they decided to do a touch of spring dusting and ended up clearing their entire flat by mistake?”

“Stop being so dramatic, Sherlock. I really don’t have time for this. Don’t go looking for John Watson, and forget about Mary. You’ll never find her. Did it ever occur to you that maybe he needed time to sort his head. Perhaps staying with one reforming alcoholic sister in the process, hm?” He seems to hear Sherlock’s silent plotting across the wires and crossed signals. “If you try to climb through Harriet Watson’s windows I’ll send Anthea for you. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten how much she resents noncompliance.”

 

Well, no, he particularly remembered the taser incident when he was twenty-nine, but still, “Then why stay there? Why won’t he come home?”

“Oh Sherlock,” Mycroft sighs, makes Sherlock feel small and sad like when they were children and his brother would ruffle his curls and manage to sound condemning and indulgent all at once. “Stop sorting through other people’s ghosts. Go back to Baker street, solve _your ,_ mysteries, and leave John to his own.”

\----

 

The next three weeks go by, and Sherlock hates every minute of it. He lets everyone know just how deep the magnitude of his dismay runs, even Donovan pulls him aside at a crime scene outside of a dilapidated warehouse in Hackney and tells Sherlock to, _“Get your shit together, right? Trust me, I’m sorry John’s not here either, you’re better with him around by far. It’s wet, it’s freezing, I have a pile of paperwork waiting for me back at the Yard, and there are two dead bodies strung from a rusty pole with their insides all out, and I’ve had a shite day too! You need to deal with it. Next time you decide to harass one of mine I’ll personally drag you through that ugly yellow tape by your hair. Don’t think I won’t. Now get in there and find us a murderer!”_

It sounds like something John would say, and Sherlock sort of wants to hug her. Obviously he doesn’t because that be admitting he was wrong in the first place, and also Sally would probably punch him in the jaw.

When Sherlock gets home at two in the morning, sopping wet from the rain and collar torn from two rounds with the murderer’s pet fen tiger (Why? Just, why?) and a stitched up puncture wound to his left calf, John is there at the top of the steps.

Sherlock walks (limps) up the stairs, keeps a hand steady on the rail. John’s fingers fidget between his knees, he looks awkwardly at damp brown boxes surrounding him. One labeled _misc._ , another _clothes._ John’s tattered army issue bag is buckled and leaning against the door, probably more clothes.

“Hello,” John says quietly. “Mrs. Hudson wasn’t in so I used my key.” He opens a palm and shows Sherlock, “It was raining, so I just--” eyes squint at Sherlock favouring his leg. “What’s happened there? You all right?”

“It’s fine,” Sherlock waves it away, “big cat.” 

John raises an eyebrow, “I should have called ahead.”

“You haven’t called at all. It’s been over a month.”

“Right. I know.”

“Have you come to stay?” Sherlock asks after several moments.

John looks up from where he’s taken up studying Sherlock’s shoes, “Is it okay?”

Sherlock lets out a breath and slumps down next to John, “Oh thank God, I’ve had to take the bins out on my own for a year now. I had no idea how tedious it could be. Then if you leave it alone, the rubbish just piles up.”

This makes John’s shoulders relax and he makes a John sound, crooks his head, “Good, fantastic. Welcome back John, bins right where you left it.”

Sherlock laughs too, is suddenly so _happy_ and relieved to be sitting cold and wet next to John and surrounded by his things. Things he intends to bring inside, place in drawers and on top of the bathroom cupboard, and Sherlock will be surrounded by little signs of John, re-taking all the empty space. He leans back against John’s bag, shuts his eyes and pats John on the knee.

“Welcome back, John.”

John leans back too, nudges the side of his head against Sherlock’s. Sherlock holds tightly when John takes the hand from off his knee, and holds it warmly against his chest.

\---

 

Sherlock sleeps until noon the next day, wakes up to the smell of a late breakfast and coffee. He stumbles into the kitchen wearing pyjama bottoms, his sheet wrapped over his shoulders.

“Sit you, how’s the cat bite.”

He flexes the sore muscle, feels the stitches hold and tells John it’s fine. They sit together over toast and eggs, John fried a bit of ham and Sherlock honestly can’t remember the last time he ate a real breakfast. John sips at his mug and watches Sherlock eat.

“She left,” he says eventually as Sherlock wipes his mouth. “Packed everything and said she couldn’t do it anymore.”

“Do what?” Sherlock asks.

“Us, I suppose.” John runs his through his hair, over his face. “Might be my fault, I couldn’t stop being so angry, and I don’t think I tried much. But every time I looked at her, touched her, I just.. I loved her, I did. But the person she was after she--” he looks at Sherlock’s chest and frowns. “I thought we could go back to it, we had a baby on the way for godsake. I don’t want to be like my Dad, worthless bastard he was, but sometimes I couldn’t _look_ at her. And she never apologised for killing you, even after she’d seen firsthand what I’d been like when I thought you were gone those two years. She was happy when we thought you’d be getting shipped off, she never said it of course, but I saw it there. There in her smile and in her eyes, and she was happy to be rid of you because then I’d be all hers.”

“Well, you were married. Not exactly a competition, flatmate versus wife.”

John looks at him sternly, “You’ve not ever been just a flatmate.”

Sherlock doesn’t know how to take that, exactly, so he stays quiet and ignores the way his heart beats too quickly and too hungrily. He doesn’t think about the fine line between wanting it to be held, or cut out from his chest.

“I thought she loved me, in her way I think she did. But she thought she owned me, too.” John shakes his head and looks toward the windows, the greyness just outside. “I wasn’t a good husband either, but I don’t think it was supposed to be that way.”

“What happened then, in the end?” 

“I woke up one morning to her packing the flat. I asked her what was going on and she said she’d made the choice for me. That’d she rather leave and be the one to do it, than stay and watch me grow to hate her. Then she told me.”

“Told you?”

“Everything. What her work used to be, how she was hired by Moriarty. She was at the pool that night, I was her mark the day you went and jumped off that roof. After Moriarty killed himself she saw it as an opportunity to leave the business, said she wasn’t getting any younger and had grown tired of running. She’d already gotten established in London, worked a few contracts a year for Moriarty and was otherwise set. I don’t know why she came looking for me. Morbid curiosity, maybe?”

Sherlock makes a noncommittal sound, perhaps Mary was seeking out the only person she thought might accept her for who she is. Of course, might have helped if she had been honest about it.

“There never was a baby,” John says finally. “Well, she was pregnant, there at the wedding she was. She said she’d..” John clears his throat and chews the inside of his cheek. “She terminated, soon after. With Magnussen on her trail, it was only a matter of time before you were too. She knew her past came with consequences, and said she might be a psychopath but she wasn’t stupid. Eventually, one day, someone would come for her, and a child would be the first one to suffer her sins.” He gives a hoarse laugh and continues. “When I asked why she kept pretending, why not say she miscarried months ago, Mary told me that I had just seemed so happy. That she would have sorted something out by the time the baby was due, and knew the baby was what would keep us together after she shot you. I feel so stupid. I really am such an idiot.”

Sherlock closes his eyes, “I’m sorry, John.”

“She’s gone, I have no idea where. Maybe I should have tried to stop her, but I didn’t want to. I stayed with Harry for a bit, before I made it here. I needed to sort my head. I didn’t want to be angry anymore, I’m so tired of being angry. God, how I have missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too.” 

\---

 

Sherlock is kissed for the first time when he is nearly thirty-seven. It’s different, because in the past he’s been the one initiating the first kiss out of controlled experimentation (Lydia Mottershead on Pentecost Sunday), inability to reign in his hormones (Tommy Finnegan under the grandstand), expressions of such fondness (Victor, beautiful studying his notes), for a case (he still feels quite badly over Janine.) 

This time someone kisses him.

John had to drag Sherlock out of a burning building four hours ago. The last pieces of evidence he needed were right there in the cellar, if Sherlock could just _get_ to them without being burned up.

No, as it turns out. Sherlock and John both have a bit of singed hair to prove it, and they’re lucky not have third degree burns to the rest of their bare skin.

Now, John is shouting uncontrollably at him in their washroom while he inspects Sherlock’s scalp for any burns as the collapsing thatching seemed keen to bury Sherlock under it.

“JESUS!” he cries out, actually asking the man to descend from heaven to take a hand in scolding Sherlock as well, “ _I_ know! I’m Sherlock Holmes and YES, I should RUN into the burning building for a SACK OF BEANS AND LAST YEARS TAXES! Bloody good idea, right-o darling! Let me just run through this dodgy bit of FIRE to my DEATH!” John tugs on Sherlock’s hair and totally mistakes the cut off whimper Sherlock makes for a pained expression. “Serves you right, we smell like melted carpet. This isn’t like that time you jumped into the Thames in February. At least you’ve a chance at surviving hypothermia while you’re doing the breaststroke next to some old shopping trolleys. Not so much perishing prematurely in some arsehole murderer’s house fire, you nutter, you utter twat! You do realise you can die, like _actually_ die, and stay dead?”

John finishes his inspection, tugs Sherlock up from where he’s sat with his eyes closed on the toilet. He didn’t hear much of what John said, the hands in his hair were far too distracting and not at all uncomfortable against his tinder scalp.

“Well, still got the murderer. Even without the beans and taxes. Worth it.” He prods the side of his bottom lip with his tongue, there’s a cut there somehow but it’s already clotted over and mostly just irksome. He stands and scans John’s kit for a nicotine patch. Needs to load his arm with at least seven of them.

“THAT’S NOT THE POINT!” John shouts, picks up the nicotine patches and launches them across the room. They pop off the wall and flutter stupidly to the floor, and then John’s hand is back in his hair, the other firm against the hollow above Sherlock’s hip. He’s simultaneously backing Sherlock up against the lip of the sink, and pulling him down. Sherlock could duck the hands clutching him if he’d wanted to, doesn’t, and when the small of Sherlock’s back nudges against the basin. “Can I?” John asks suddenly, eyes wide. Sherlock only nods once, and John finally _finally_ sets his lips across Sherlock’s.

Because Sherlock is very likely entering some form of shock, and because he suddenly has forgotten how to allow himself to be kissed, he lets his hands rest on John’s shoulders. John is making some noise deep in the back of his throat, and Sherlock remembers to open his mouth. The tips of their tongues immediately slide together and John’s hands contract and hold Sherlock. They’re taking something from each other, breathing warm air into the hollow of the other’s mouth and clinging on to skin because at any moment they might be taken apart.

“Oh fuck,” John breathes, moves his mouth lower and begins licking and nipping at Sherlock’s throat, half gone and mad with it, perhaps they’re running out of time somehow and there’s just so much left untouched. “Are you panicking? Should I stop? I’ve just--for ages--” and he abandons the sentence for Sherlock’s mouth again.

“I’m not panicking,” Sherlock says between kisses, voice nothing but a thing of air and a pitch he hasn’t heard out loud in so long. 

“Ok, good,” the words are ragged coming from John’s mouth, “Good, good, ah,” he says, kisses him hard and perfect, the way Sherlock wants to be kissed. Wants to feel the throb and bruising of his lips and be made to feel it into the next day. And the next. And the next.

Oh, God, this is getting out of hand, it’s been _years_ since he’s had a man this close, one that’s he wanted so much and for so long, his body is making a point of demonstrating just how starved of touch it’s been. Lizard brain takes front and center without any effort at all, and this is evident in the way Sherlock moans and balances on the edge of the drain. Gets a leg around John’s hip and that makes John grunt and move a hand to pull at that leg, their hips fitting together. Sherlock feels something that he should have expected, and for some reason didn’t. It makes Sherlock pant at John’s lips, reach down between his legs to palm at John. John’s hard. His cock dresses to the left in his jeans and the ridge of it nestles hotly against Sherlock’s inner thigh. His fingers dart to John’s belt, and it’s an awkward fumble made less noticeable by the way John seems so eager too.

“I should stop,” John whispers, bites Sherlock throat and sucks a bruise under his ear. He says, “J-- _jeeessuss_ ,” when he hears the jingle of his belt coming loose. “God, should take you to bed. Do this properly, shit.” He braces a hand against the mirror behind Sherlock’s head, his left hand holds far less less clumsy fingers than Sherlock’s as he pops the button on Sherlock’s trousers. “Wanted you for so long.” 

Sherlock can’t tell him with words just how much he understands, it isn’t possible when John is making that sound and dragging Sherlock’s trousers and pants over his hips. The toothbrushes fall off the sink and onto the toilet, scattering onto the floor when Sherlock reaches a hand back to steady himself.

Sherlock jolts at the first touch of their cocks sliding together, John’s hand wrapped around them as best as he can. It sends Sherlock’s mouth panting open, wide eyed at at the ceiling, curls crushed against the mirror.

“This isn’t going to--” John gasps and his body quivers and he visibly tries to slow the bucking of his hips. “There’ll be time later,” John promises mostly to himself it seems, and his pace quickens again. Sherlock has shut his eyes to the blaring whiteness of the ceiling, air heaving itself in and out of his lungs as all other instinct but to rolls his hips leaves. John reaches up his free hand, tangles it into Sherlock’s hair, whispers, “Look,” and pulls until Sherlock is looking down with John between their bodies. Sherlock notes helplessly the pressure coiling into his spine, the copious leaking of his preejeaculate. John’s cock is thick and red where it’s pressing against Sherlock.

“Oh my God,” Sherlock cries out hoarsely, just as John calls him _”Gorgeous,”_ and that’s when Sherlock’s whole body begins to shake. He’s making incoherent sounds and pressing open hands hard against either side of John’s face, comes that way with his penis twitching wildly in John’s palm.

“Fuck, ah fuck,” John pulls his hips away and pumps himself roughly. It makes slick noises that Sherlock barely has time to commit to memory before John is calling Sherlock’s name, shoving close once again at the apex of Sherlock’s spread legs, and ejaculatating in milky globules over Sherlock’s not yet flaccid cock.

John nudges his sweaty brow against Sherlock’s chest. He can feel the damp soaking between buttons that gave up trying to stay slotted through their holes, Sherlock’s own sweat drops down his spine, tickles and makes him shiver.

Without all the adrenaline and arousal pumping through his veins, Sherlock is rapidly becoming aware that the ledge of the sink makes for a sore arse, but he’s afraid to move. Shock, disbelief, elation, exhaustion, and his own nervousness, makes the idea of balancing awkwardly on this sink with a sweaty John wrapped about him makes moving not so desirable. No more safety net of innocuous touches and longing looks sent the other’s way when neither think they’re looking. Even Sherlock, despite all his lapses in basic social contract, is aware of the shift that occurs when two people strip off their pants and rub each other to orgasm.

He’d be happy to stay here in this bubble where for a few intense minutes, he had everything he wanted.

He’s even more alarmed when John begins giggling quietly, then louder, until gasping and holding onto Sherlock for support. If this is the onset of a sexual crisis (which Sherlock strongly suspected before that John’s interests weren’t singular in gender) then Sherlock wants no part of it. It’s been difficult enough coming to terms with his own existence, he can hardly balance John’s as well.

Instead, John peels himself backward, and looks up at Sherlock with big blue eyes. “C’mere,” his arm tightens around Sherlock’s waist and he pulls him from off the sink, steadies him back on solid ground. He stays in Sherlock’s space, noses at his shoulder as he fishes a flannel from the drain and dampens it. A moment later, he’s gently wiping their mess from Sherlock’s belly. Sherlock sighs and closes his eyes when John fits his softened penis in his hand and strokes over it with the warm rag. It’s so achingly intimate a gesture, reverent and careful, calculated with every caress of thumb to ensure Sherlock feels loved.

John tips his chin up in an offer of a kiss, not rushing of demanding, and that’s exactly what it is: An offer. The set of his mouth is defiant as always, as if John could be any other way, and it’s the same set of lips that have whispered Sherlock’s name a hundred times before, and this mouth has hurt him before, but also made him happier than Sherlock thought possible.

Sherlock bends and accepts, banishes any notion of being unwanted.

“Obviously I can do a bit better than five minutes,” John laughs again. “Oh my god, that wasn’t how I ever expected that to happen.”

“I never expected it to happen at all,” Sherlock is aware that his cheeks are pinkened, can feel the dilation of the blood vessels there.

John looks guilty for a moment, smooths Sherlock’s hair away from his forehead. “You’re all I want.” He says it so simply.

\---

 

They’re lying in bed together three months later. Nothing has changed between them, only the added bonus of kissing and Sherlock can stick his cold feet under John’s thighs while watching telly, and sex. A good bit of it. Against the fridge, on the sitting room floor, in John’s chair with Sherlock’s head pressed against John’s riding him slowly while John mumbles “Yeah, yes,” and “God,” and “Sherlock,” breathlessly.

Then there’s the lazy mornings like this in their bed, still sleep warm and lazy. Sherlock turned over on his front while John licks and presses kisses down his spine. 

He stills for one moment, his fingers spread out and trace the linear scars down Sherlock’s back. John presses at Sherlock’s ribs, turns him to face upward, covers the gunshot scar on Sherlock’s chest with his hand. 

“Does it still hurt you?” He whispers, furrows his brow at the spot like he can remove the silvered tissue by sheer force of will.

Sherlock lifts his own palm, traces the more ragged starburst marring John’s shoulder. “Does yours?”

John only smiles down at him, his eyes peaceful as dawn breaks overhead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for leaving this story unfinished for so very long. I've been struggling with debilitating illness and fighting for my mental health during this difficult time. 
> 
> I hate to leave a work orphaned though, so I pushed through, and while it might not be perfect... At least it is complete!


End file.
